Kilsudgeon Festival is back.

It was gone during the pandemic. They tried a Zoom one but some latchikos kept hacking in it to try and sell crypto or show off their bits.

Denis said that was nearly better than watching someone doing Irish dancing in their milking parlour.

Then there was a row over sponsorship. HaveAGo, the big gambling firm, wanted to put a bit of money into it. But then it turned out they were handing out free bets in the schools, so that put the kibosh on it.

It’s back now as an eco-festival. Some wind turbine crowd are putting big money in.

Not everything is back. They got rid of the raffle, thank God. They don’t need the money so bad. That used to go on for ages and the prizes were cat.

One year someone won a load of sausages but never collected them and the foxes were barking around the green all night.

But one thing that is back is Miss Road Frontage – Kilsudgeon’s beauty pageant. It used to be deadly serious.

Miss Road Frontage

Poor Jennifer, my younger daughter went in for Miss Road Frontage one year. I blame myself really. I told her it’d be good for her “to put herself out there."

“Never again Mam. I don’t want anything to do with ‘out there.’ I was scarred by the experience.”

She didn’t win. She thinks it was because during the interview when Dinny asked her if she had her eye on any of the escorts she said “the pool was a bit shallow.”

“You know the bit where they announced the winner and everyone rushed over for the hugs. I swear Mam there were girls actually throwing digs in there.”

But then some ‘influencer’ heard about the festival, there was an old clip that went viral, so everyone is making a bit of a Father Ted of it.

Which is why I couldn’t believe Freya, my niece, went in for it.

The pageant is on the main stage. I can hardly dare look at it. I’m standing next to her mother, my sister Geraldine. Freya is up for the interview.

They don’t have a swimsuit section. It’s the Snickers section. The girls have to dress in work trousers and hold a slash hook to show how they ‘trim their hedges’.

“Oh God,” says Geraldine. “It’s backwards we’re going, Ann.”

The host is George Buckley. He got booted out of CountyTalk for being on the tax defaulters list. He has a podcast now UnBuckled giving out about immigrants and “climate change fanatics doing cloud-seeding.”

But he took the turbine money handy enough. George is doing the whole Miss World on it.

“Our next contestant is Freya, just finished her Leaving Cert at St Udgeon’s. Freya what are your hopes for the future?”

“I want us all to work together for world peace,” says Freya, that gets a cheer. I can’t tell if she’s being serious, but she’s not finished. “And to do so, we need to smash the grip of the cold dead hand of the patriarchy” and that gets a cheer as well. Because she says it with a smile.

“I see,” says George “and what would you do for Kilsudgeon?”

“I want to make Kilsudgeon a place for tourists to visit and to create jobs so our young people can stay here,” she says.

Again, she’s doing very well. And again, she sneaks in “but to do this we need to dismantle the capitalist system that has put the working people under the thumb of the oligarchs. And … C’mon the Kilsudgeon Slashers in the county final!”

She’s after doing subliminal messaging on the whole town.

She comes up after with her 2nd prize rosette and a voucher of €100 for the butcher.

“Just tearing the system down from the inside Auntie Ann,” she says.