The Parish by Alice Taylor

kind. We were in for the long haul as three of us had booked into a local guesthouse and reserve troops were to come down daily from home.
    The first day would tell a lot. We had a bonanza! One of the reserves who came down that day was Jane who is a race-goer, and when the punters wanted to know if we had a winner, Jane gave one man Monty’s Pass who went on to win. When this man came back that evening, he handed us his betting slip to draw the winnings. It was a magnanimous gesture and we were delighted, but he was gone in the crowd before we could thank him properly. Later that night, he passed on his way to the pub and we asked him about his generosity. “I was born outside this town,” he said, “and my family hadn’t much but when I got to Dublin I did law at night and now I have my own law firm. This town was good to me and it’s good to be good to where you came from. As well as that, it’s great to see people going out and making an effort for their own place.” That man made my day.
    The following morning, Hazel and I were manning the corner when a miserable-looking man approached us and I murmured under my breath to Hazel, “Nothing doing there anyway.” But Hazel, the eternal optimist, approached him and in her lilting accent softly introduced the subject—“Would you like to buy a ticket?”—and much to my amazement his hand slowly made its way into a deep inside pocket where a note detached itself from a wad of its companions; having told Hazel that she was a grand girl, he went on his way, and I learned the lesson that you can never predict a buyer!
    As well as races, we attended shows, horse fairs and shopping centres. We covered the Prize Cattle Show in the Green Glens in Millstreet where Noel C. Duggan gave us a prime location and bought our first two tickets. It was a great experience to view those perfectly groomed highly bred cattle that are the models of the bovine world. One normallyassociates the Green Glens with beautiful horses but there we saw that a well-groomed cow is as elegant as any top-class hunter. Politicians came there to strut their stuff because this is the
crème de la crème
of the dairying industry.
    We had a great day at Skibbereen Show and there we had the additional advantage that our parish priest, Fr John, had come to us from Skibbereen. It soon became obvious that he had left good memories behind him in the town as the people were delighted to welcome him back and were generous in their support. It was a lovely sunny day and our site under the shelter of an overhanging hedge had a good view of the entire field.
    A cattle show must surely be one of the most deeply satisfying and entertaining ways to spend a day in rural Ireland; its title is actually misleading because it encompasses a flower show, art and crafts display, farm-produce competition and a display of the best farm animals, as well as all the up-to-date farm machinery. People wander around and look at all that is on view and in the process meet the neighbours and old friends whom they may not have seen since the last show. In previous years, every fair-sized town had a cattle show which was referred to simply as “the show”, but with the decline in agriculture they have dwindled and with them one of the most welcome social aspects of rural Ireland.
    On one of our many outings, we visited a horse fair which necessitated a drive of many miles. On arrival, we experienced quite a culture shock. Horses trotted up and down the street, rearing up in protest at approaching traffic. It was like a scene from the Wild West, and if some of the horses were wild, they were no more so than the people who traversed the town. Tanned, tough-looking men in black vests, with tattoos inall visible areas, led prancing ponies and piebald horses up and down the town, accompanied by women in knee-high white plastic boots, wearing skirts up as far as possible and overflowing tops down as far as possible and brassy blonde hair