If the Galway Races demonstrate anything, it is the deep-dyed reluctance of the average Irish male to wear a hat. The point was only underlined yesterday by Ladies Day, when every self-respecting woman was crowned with something that could take your eye out if you met it at the wrong angle. By contrast, apart from the tiny minority competing for the token best-dressed male prize, the minority gender again restricted itself to whatever head-cover nature provided, writes Frank McNally
Outside the Orange order, horse-racing is about the last bastion in Ireland of hat-wearing by men. At the Cheltenham festival in March, where the sporting of a trilby by English trainers is apparently required by law, maybe half of their Irish counterparts wear one too. It's partly because of the weather, but there's also a touch of the uniform about it. If a man in a trilby walks into the owners-and-trainers bar at Cheltenham, the doorman probably doesn't even need to check if he has the right badge.
At Galway in late summer, however, the trilbies are gone and nothing replaces them. Even the most aristocratic members of the horsey set go native, blending in with the locals by the simple expedient of taking their hats off. If you're a man, wearing so much as a sun-hat would mark you out as eccentric, perhaps earning you a picture in the newspapers. Surveying the crowds at Ballybrit, you'd think there was a penal law that forbade Irish males to go about in public with their heads covered.
There was a clash of cultures in Galway on Wednesday with the presence at the venue of evangelists from Ascot. They were proselytising not for the English track's royal festival, of course, but on behalf of its lesser-known jump-race meetings. Even so, the shadow of Ascot's famous top-hat only emphasised the bare-headed republicanism of Galway where, with the possible exception of Dermot Weld, there is no such thing as royalty.
The big race meeting across the Irish Sea this week is "glorious" Goodwood, which along with Royal Ascot brackets the English summer. The two events wear their adjectives like head-dress - Goodwood's would probably be a straw hat or a fedora. Typically, Galway prefers to go without an adjective, displaying itself in the natural state - unkempt hair, the beginnings of a bald spot and all, without regard for what anybody else thinks.
Even in the infamous tented village, the absence of a dress code is immaculately observed. Given the hype about the Fianna Fáil tent, in particular, journalists admitted to it often experience acute anti-climax because everybody looks so, well, ordinary. "You can let them out but you can't dress them up," is a common reaction upon entering. At any rate, you won't see men's headwear there either. Not even the alleged cowboys wear hats.
It could be a political thing. At Ascot, the rules governing the royal enclosure are relaxed for overseas visitors, who are allowed to wear national dress. But of course the nearest thing the Irish have to national dress is whatever the English don't wear. This may explain our hat-avoidance.
There was certainly a political edge to the reception given at Ballybrit to Kieren Fallon, one of the small group of Irishmen at the festival who are required to wear head protection. Banned from riding in Britain while he faces trial on charges of conspiracy to defraud race-goers, the Clare jockey was greeted in Galway like the Playboy of the Western World. It helped that by riding the hot favourite to victory in Wednesday's 5.35, he facilitated punters in their ongoing conspiracy to take money off the bookmakers. But the attitude in Galway was that he was innocent until proven guilty by a British court, and probably innocent even then.
Before the race he was received warmly in the FF tent, where they've been accused of a few things themselves over the years. Then, after his nail-bitingly narrow win, it was the general public's turn to embrace him, and he was roared back to the winners' enclosure. The media were not immune to the excitement. One local radio pundit greeted the return of "the man they call the assassin" and compared Fallon's fate to other miscarriages of justice: "Remember the Birmingham Six? Sixteen years in jail for something they didn't do."
The assassin was already striding back to the weigh-room, applause trailing after him. There would have been hats thrown in the air, except of course that nobody had one. And the only other thing missing from the scene was someone to raise a toast, like Sara Tansey toasting Christy in the Playboy: "Drink a health to the wonders of the western world, the pirates, preachers, poteen-makers, with the jobbing jockies, parching peelers, and the juries [ that] fill their stomachs selling judgments of the English law."