Yearning for an early taste of France en fete but reluctant to leave the country? Just take the Waterford road out of Carrick-on-uir and prepare to be dazzled. If it's a hundred French flags, an assortment of Irish tricolours and numerous Bienvenue banners, that must be Piltown, population 800, one pub - and the only village in Co Kilkenny through which the Tour will pass.
The logic is unassailable: "We're smaller so we have to try harder", says Kerry O'Keeffe, the committee spokesman, with a nod towards Carrick-on-Tour up the road, "and it's now that the foreign journalists are passing through". These people are drawn from every organisation in the parish and they mean business. Next Thursday the Minister for Agricuture, Joe Walsh, will arrive in the village to launch the countdown to the Tour. And he'll be back for the Tour itself, occupying the reviewing stand with no less a personage than his French counterpart, Louis Le Pensec, who after flying in by French Government jet on the Monday will head straight for Piltown.
Were the Piltowners not so hard-working and so full of joie de vivre, you might dismiss them as merely lucky. They have their very own French woman - Michelle Burke - and are twinned with the Breton town of Mellac. As fate would have it, the chairman of that first twinning committee happened to be Monsieur Le Pensec himself.
The scent and feel of France will be evident all over Piltown come Tour weekend. The streets will be filled with music and a big, French-style market offering all sorts of high-quality foods and wines produced by French and Irish companies. The thought of 15,000 visitors doesn't abash them in the slightest - they do that every year for the Iverk Show. With the lads and lassies from nearby Kildalton College gone for the summer, there will be lots of B&B accommodation for visitors. Meanwhile, in true French style, the Iverk showfield is being opened up to campers, who will have access to GAA facilities close by for showers and the like. So: Bienvenue a Piltown, as they might say in the south-east.
