REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE NATIONAL AND EUROPEAN PLOUGHING CHAMPIONSHIPS
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE NATIONAL AND EUROPEAN PLOUGHING CHAMPIONSHIPS CARDENTON, ATHY, CO. KILDARE
Dia dhíbh. Tá an-áthas orm bheith thar nais anseo i bhúr measc agus tá mé buíoch díbh as an cuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom. It is my great pleasure to be back here at Cardenton to open the 2010 National and European Ploughing Championships. This year, we have the great honour of hosting the European championships and to all those who have travelled to these shores for this event, I wish you all a special céad míle fáilte – a hundred thousand welcomes and I thank our hosts the Fennin and Fox families and all the farmers and local community here in Athy for making every one of us visitors feel so very much at home.
It takes a massive community effort to transform a working farm and its fields into a temporary city complete with traffic management, entertainment, restaurants, exhibits, competitions, workshops, information points and meeting places. For these few days friends and strangers will amble around Cardenton making and gathering new memories, new friends, new ideas, new purchases and when they leave it will be reluctantly because no-one wants a good time to end. The experiences and opinions of visitors to the Ploughing Championships are its lifeblood. Your enthusiasm and support vindicate all the hard work it takes to make the event happen every year. It takes an old-fashioned meitheal of serious effort with many individuals and organisations working alongside the host family and the National Ploughing Association - Kildare County Council, the Gardaí, local residents, Kildare Tourism and various clubs and rural organisations. Thank you all for the way in which, despite the tough economic climate, you have brought to these fields not just a brand new temporary capital of rural Ireland, but a visible and inspirational sign of what we are capable of achieving when we pull together.
But then there is inspirational leadership right at the top and whether times are good or bad, Anna May McHugh and Anna Marie along with their team face into the logistics of this massive annual undertaking with sheer determination and resilience and each year they deliver an experience even better than the year before. More than that the Ploughing Championships remind us of how important the earth is to us, how critical food production is, how essential good animal husbandry and crop production are to our health as individuals and our reputation as a nation. Here we can marvel at the ingenuity and entrepreneurialism which has given us such a dynamic agri-food sector which is successful at home and abroad. And as we become more and more persuaded to Grow it Ourselves, we can find here the tried and trusted pathways to doing that.
Mahatma Gandhi put it very simply when he said “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” Here you bring us back close to the earth, to the skill of preparing the land that the art of ploughing exemplifies. The ploughman or woman is focussed on using the present to prepare well for the future. He or she knows that there are things up ahead over which they have no control, weather, global economics, illness, pests but they also know that if they do nothing then there will be no hope of a harvest. So they plough and plant, their faces turned to the future in hope and their hands and hearts determined to be active creators of that future, not passive spectators. These Championships honour those who plough and, of course, it is a special thrill to have competitors from countries hoping to become European Champions. Included in the field is our very own European Champion, John Whelan. We wish all our visiting competitors and friends a great competition and a wonderful, happy visit to Athy. I wish all the contestants a clean sod and a straight furrow and declare the 2010 National and European Ploughing Championships open.
Go raibh maith agaibh arís as ucht an cuireadh chun bheith anseo agus go n-éirí go geal libh go léir.