{"id":626858,"date":"2026-09-16T22:14:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T22:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/626858\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T22:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T22:14:14","slug":"blue-nasal-strips-and-an-entire-tent-dedicated-to-2-johnnies-merch-dominate-ploughing-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/626858\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue nasal strips and an entire tent dedicated to 2 Johnnies merch dominate Ploughing \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The battle for the title of most desirable merch at the ploughing<\/a> was unexpectedly fought between sky blue nasal strips and Brat-green tote bags carrying lines of scripture.<\/p>\n

The blue strips won it by a nose and while they\u2019re designed to stop snoring, a great many wide-awake people wore them as they wandered the sprawling site checking out a cornucopia of activities that \u2013 in any other context \u2013 might be considered unhinged.<\/p>\n

But in the context of an Irish September, there was nothing out of the ordinary in the welly throwing, the tug of wars, the sheep shearing, the baking and the Christian evangelising. <\/p>\n

Stalls were selling everything from farm machinery and wild Irish honey to modular homes and complicated outdoor clothes and one whole tent for 2 Johnnies T-shirts and socks.<\/p>\n

Obviously. <\/p>\n

All through the morning as an unenthusiastic sun tried to break through stony grey clouds, traffic jams of red double-decker buses ferried people from Tullamore to the sprawling green fields of Screggan.<\/p>\n

Brendan Mangan boarded one bus with the aid of a walking stick and sat close to the driver and The Irish Times. <\/p>\n

He was, he said, born in Dublin and spent his adult life farming in Mayo before moving to Kildare. He has been to the ploughing \u201ctoo many times to remember\u201d over many decades. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Rain and sunshine expected this week with mixed conditions in store for National Ploughing ChampionshipsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He was looking forward to meeting people \u201cand to talking to some good politicians and to some of the frauds\u201d. <\/p>\n

Once inside, he and around 80,000 others were enveloped by fields of complicated looking farm machinery and a dizzying array of stalls, but it was a simple pull-up bar outside the AIB pavilion that proved to be one of the biggest draws. <\/p>\n

\"CrowdsCrowds at the National Ploughing Championships 2026. Photograph: Dara Mac D\u00f3naill \/ The Irish Times <\/p>\n

People were invited to hang from the bar for as long as possible with the winners getting a place on a leader board. Most struggled to hang limply for more than a minute but the record holder \u2013 an unidentified 14-year-old girl managed it for just over four minutes. <\/p>\n

Jess Kilkenny from Galway was in a long queue waiting to get into the pop-up Inter-Sport Elvery\u2019s shop.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m here because my kids wanted to go in for a look,\u201d she said. \u201cApart from that I\u2019m more of a taxi driver today than anything else. There are the twin boys, they\u2019re 16 and our smallest is 10. And our 11-year old is there with his friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

They were all having the craic. The president of the Irish Farmers\u2019 Association Francie Gorman was enjoying the ploughing too, but he had a serious message to share. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Robodogs, fashion and welly-throwing: The National Ploughing Championships kicks offOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He said the country was facing a difficult winter. \u201cIt is not just farmers. Fuel is a huge issue for everybody across the board,\u201d he said, and called on the Government to confirm financial supports sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n

He said the spike in the price of fertiliser since the US warn on Iran started last spring was a \u201chuge\u201d issue. <\/p>\n

\"CathalCathal Batersby and Paddy Muldon, from Skryne, Co Meath at the Ploughing.
\nPhotograph: Dara Mac D\u00f3naill \/ The Irish Times <\/p>\n

\u201cFertiliser has become so expensive now, farmers are beginning to not spread it and that is impacting the amount of grass we can produce. It impacts everything. You spread less fertiliser, you have lower yields of grass, lower yields of grain, lower yields of maize, of milk and beef, lamb.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked if the IFA would support fuel protests if they happen this winter he said that as an organisation it had held back from protesting in the spring but he said the level of dissatisfaction being felt by farms as we head into winter was comparable to the spring. \u201cIt\u2019s a real concern,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

So too is the soaring price of home heating oil, which he said would hit many in rural communities hard in the weeks ahead. <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd there\u2019s a wedge of grass growth there that we lost in the summer. That has never been made up,\u201d he added. Farmers \u201cshould be going into the winter with five to six months fodder in the yard. And at the moment, there\u2019s a lot of farmers that don\u2019t have sufficient fodder stocks. If we get a benign autumn and things are not too bad and the spring comes good, it mightn\u2019t be a problem but as someone said to me, \u201chope is not a strategy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The battle for the title of most desirable merch at the ploughing was unexpectedly fought between sky blue…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626859,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11976,61,60,12468,43,8286],"class_list":["post-626858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-national-ploughing-championships","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-irish-farmers-association","tag-news","tag-offaly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626858\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}