"Plough ahead," urged Lara Croft, the computer game heroine, from the posters lining the route to Ballacolla. Ah, yes, indeed, that ingenious combination of ancient and cutting-edge technology one expects from any modern business. What next? Multi-storey car-parking? "Have a run at it," urged a car-park man as we eyed the churned-up ground and the chances of a car sinking to Australia.
"Oh Lord . . . you soften it with showers," said Bishop John Neill, thanking the Lord for his many gifts to the land - overdoing it a tad as raindrops fattened and we hunched stoically, umbrella-less, like real farmers, waiting for the President, Mrs McAleese, to cut the ribbon and restore our perspective.
"Australia has Sydney but we have Ballacolla," she declared, as her aide-de-camp leapt forward with an umbrella to shield her from the un-Sydney-like elements. Then, at Bishop Laurence Forristal's urging, we exchanged the sign of peace, shaking hands with strangers; an exercise deemed "brilliant" by one young farmer - who none the less thought the bishop was pushing it a bit by launching into the Lord's Prayer. Then we rushed off to find Tom from Big Brother. The ploughing championships are like that; a startling, eccentric, loveable alliance of the old and the new.
Tom? Ah yes, Tom McDermott, farmer and IT man, from Tyrone. A made-in-heaven combination for the telecommunications company that had hired him for the day and aimed to merge the two in a campaign targeting the farming community. They had flown him down in a helicopter and knew what they were doing. In 40 seconds, he was surrounded, not just by journalists but by every 15-year-old in the place, begging for his autograph. Can he bear it any longer? "I love it," he sighed. "Love it!" Tom, it transpires, wants to be in the movies. "Of course I'd love it, who wouldn't?"
"D'ya miss Melanie?" asked the girls. "Ah, look at his cheekbones," they sighed.
After that, things could only go downhill. Even the electric fence terminals stuck into a potato and emitting ear-splitting cracks to demonstrate its "massive" voltage failed to generate the same excitement. "Wouldn't be long getting you out of bed in the morning," grunted a farmer at his teenage son.
You could consult the Revenue Commissioners, talk to the Midland Health Service, buy a gold bracelet or a bag of haylage, or "win a blonde for £1". . What they mean on closer scrutiny is a blonde d'Aquitaine. Cute. The real business of the day was taking place in the fields; 300 ploughmen and women there to find a champion, reminiscent of another era, when the State's first Minister for Agriculture appealed to farmers to produce one more sow, one more cow and one more acre under the plough. The championship's extraordinary managing director, secretary and 50-year veteran, Anna May McHugh's most earnest wish was that they would all somehow manage to remain on the land. The President, Mrs McAleese, recalled a time when her father and his siblings had to emigrate from the small family farm in Roscommon.
But yesterday the farmers of Ireland looked content. "The weather's holding up," said Hugh McEneaney, "cattle prices are good, they've had an excellent grain harvest, sugar beet is looking good and there's good buoyancy in the milk market. So there's not a lot of complaints . . ."
And the turnout? We asked development relations officer Anna Marie McHugh. Her answer was drowned by surrounding noise. "15,000?" we queried. "15,000?" she scoffed, "Sure you'd have them in the backyard". The answer is 50,000. Rural Ireland is alive and well.