My father was showing horses from the day dot and I can remember when I was at school, going out at lunchtime to feed horses.

He always had horses. Dad worked with them for years before he went to America and when he came home, he was straight back into them. He was in New York for over 10 years. There’s five of us in our family and Colm, the eldest, was born in America.

Dad had a lovely Irish Draught horse he bought as a foal in Ballinasloe and he got on very well jumping in America afterwards, that must have been 30, 35 years ago.

Cloone would be our local show, we’ve never missed it in 30 years. We had one mare that went to that show for over 20 years and the show gave us a lovely crystal bowl in 1998, with a picture of her on it, as a thank you for supporting their show down through the years.

We’d head for Cloone on the August bank holiday Monday and then Dublin. Galway County Show was a great marker, usually if you got on well in Galway County, you got on well in Dublin.

We wouldn’t really show the young horses much until they were three-year-olds, we’d show them at local shows to give them a few outings. I remember one year at Dublin we had a two-year-old and a three-year-old at the top of the line, both of them won and my father got a medal for winning the most prizes in Dublin that year.

Lucky mare

Favourites? I suppose the mare that we had for years at Cloone Show, she bred very well and was very lucky for us. Then there was Fiddler, or Corn Mill as we called him after the local theatre here in Carrigallen. He was the reserve young horse champion at the Kerrygold Dublin Horse Show in 1992 and was by Sweet Con off a Draught mare. They’re like hens teeth now.

That’s what we bred again last year, Ambrose Irwin’s Dublin yearling champion which he bought from me as a foal. He’s another direct half-bred, he’s out of a Draught mare Springvale Ginger Queen and by a thoroughbred horse, Let The Lion Roar.

His half-brother by Emperor Augustus (Tom and Lynn Spence’s Gortshalgan Emperor) ended up fourth in the middleweight class over in the other ring at the same time as the yearling class was on but we weren’t moving until after the championship!

Dublin is our holiday. My father would head up with us at half past five in the morning, that’s how enthusiastic he is and what stamina that generation has.

One year, he had a black horse by Actinium, bred by Myles Walsh, in a class of 42 at Dublin and he was second from the bottom. As soon as the judges saw him up close, he went to the top of the line. I think there was one fourth place, otherwise it was never below third in Dublin.

Philip and Deirdre Scott produced the horses for my father, lovely people, you make great friends from the shows. 1992-1998 were our best years, Michael Slavin wrote some lovely articles about the shows back then.

At the minute we have three mares, two Draught mares and a Cruisings Micky Finn mare, Tullibard Ask Benny. She bred TFM Blue, by Cheers Cassini, third in the three-year-old fillies loose jumping final at Dublin in 2016.

I’m on the Irish Shows Association judges panel and do enjoy judging, it’s just hard to get time in the summer. I do it as straight as I can, everyone has a different opinion but once you stick to your opinion of the type of horse you’re looking for, you won’t go wrong.

Frankie, my husband, and I have three children; Lily, Katie and Thomas. My parents live with us. We joined up two houses so it’s separate living but all under the one roof, from grandparents to grandchildren, the best of both worlds.

Tech savvy

The kids are off school and haven’t left the yard but they’re happy out, going round pretending they’re vets and feeding pet lambs. When we were kids we’d ask Tim Mulligan, the vet in Arva, for plastic syringes and they were our water squirters, now our kids are playing the same games.

We’ve moved on leaps and bounds with technology. I remember once when Paul Williams, from the Sunday World, was in Ballinamore with his mobile phone, the size of a brick and people were going to look at this phone with no wires, nothing. Now kids are swiping phones from 15 months old!

My father’s heart was always in Ireland – he never really settled in America – but Colm lives in Long Island now and we’ve been over to see him and his family. Colm used to come home and hunt with the Leitrims and Ballymacads during the winter – he’d hunt Wednesday and Saturday, then go home on Sunday. Frankie is a staunch Ballymacad follower too.

Colm has three pubs in New York and a farm in Long Island but everything is shut down there too. His daughter Kristyn (15) loves horses and wore the green coat on the Irish juniors Nations Cup team down in Wellington, Florida. Kevin Babington would say that Kristyn just has a talent for understanding horses.

Colm is great friends with Kevin, he was with him in the warmup before Kevin’s accident last summer and went into the hospital nearly every day to visit him afterwards. Colm is on the Kevin Babington Foundation board, he’d do anything to help Kevin because Kevin would be the first to help anyone out.

Best laid plans

You don’t know what’s around the corner, do you? For this year, I was thinking of showing a yearling full-brother to the Dublin champion but that’s not important now amid the current pandemic.

My mother’s brother was buried last Saturday. Usually people will gather for a funeral to be there, tell a story. You haven’t closure now. If we could just contain the virus, if people could be sensible so our doctors and nurses can cope, although I think people will lie low until there’s a vaccine found. If we all get out of this safe, that’s all that matters.

Deirdre McGuckian Tully was in conversation with Susan Finnerty.