No public access to 2020 Ploughing Championships
The Ploughing has become the latest public event to fall by the wayside.
The National Ploughing Association has today announced that the public part of the event, the trade exhibition, will not take place this year.
However, it hopes to run the ploughing competitions behind closed gates.
This year’s event was due to take place in Ballintrane, Fenagh, Co Carlow from September 15 to 17.
However, in a statement this morning, the NPA Managing Director Anna May McHugh said: “the Executive reached this very difficult decision to cancel the Trade Exhibition as public health and safety is our foremost priority given the current global pandemic.
“With visitor attendance last year of 297,000 and up to 1,700 exhibitors, we had too many concerns about how we could implement social distancing and the potential risk of bringing together people from all over the country.
However we are still hoping that we may be able to run the National Ploughing Competitions behind closed gates and that situation will be closely reviewed over the next number of weeks”.
The association said over the next few weeks it would be making full refunds to those who had booked exhibition space.
The NPA said with an annual economic impact in the region of 45 million euro, the loss of the event is significant.
However, it said it is looking forward to 2021 which will mark the 90th year of the NPA and when Ireland will be hosting the World Ploughing Contest in tandem with the National on September 15-17 at a venue yet to be confirmed.