THE FASCINATOR is dead. Long live the hatinator. It’s the must have, this season. Apparently. Both have feathery things and a band around the head, but the hatinator also has a brim. Which makes it half a hat. There must be more to life.
Then again, you could be listening to politicians at the MacGill Summer School. Which makes you lose the will to live.
It’s a matter of priorities.
Ladies Day yesterday at the Galway Races – never mind the horses: feel the hats.
The bookies took a pasting. Six favourites out of eight romped home. Trainer Dermot Weld had four winners and is on the way to smashing his Galway record.
Of course, we haven’t tuppence any more. Times are bad. But over half a million euro was wagered with the track bookies for the big race and they took in almost four million in the course of the afternoon.
Is this the mattress money that Michael Noonan wants people to start spending?
And how different are things in Galway since the mad years?
In the heady days, you couldn’t move. In the main drag, along the long line between the Budweiser Bar and the Tote, there was a heaving crush of people all the way up the champagne tent.
Then, were you of a mind, you had to fight your way into that.
Yesterday, the place was still crowded. But there was room to move. Ballybrit was a far more comfortable place.
But a lot of people – an awful lot of people – were still splashing the cash, even if attendance was slightly down on last year.
An outsider looking in would have thought we are a very affluent people.
Guinness sponsored the card, and the big race – the Galway Hurdle – produced the day’s most popular winner as 25-1 shot Moon Dice romped home for Kilkenny’s “Three Friers Cross Syndicate”.
“There’s seven of us: four farmers, two plumbers and an accountant,” said Eddie Aylward of Glenmore. “We had her mother, Ella Come Home, as well, but this is our biggest win, out and out. There’ll be no cows milked tomorrow morning!”
Fianna Fáil has had a tradition of Aylward TDs. But the party lucked out yesterday. Enda Kenny’s stripe continues to sparkle.
Dan Aylward who bred the winning horse and is one of the plumbers in the syndicate declared: “I’m a Fine Gael Aylward – although this is not about politics, this is about horse racing.”
The syndicate celebrated last night in Galway’s Huntsman Inn and said they would be taking the party on to the River Glen and the Slieverue in Kilkenny.
Meanwhile, presidential hopeful Mary Davis visited the races, happy in the knowledge that her odds have gone from 50-1 to 6-1. She was joined by her daughter Emma (24), who wore a hat designed by Wicklow milliner Carol Smith which, strange but true, featured her mother’s name spelled out in pipe cleaners.
Mary met another Mary as she walked around Ballybrit. Galway native and Fine Gael TD Mary Mitchell O’Connor looked wonderful in a pink and fuchsia suit from Audrey Taylor in Sandycove and a wonderful hat by young milliner Fiona Mangan – “an unemployed architecht from Athenry who has found her true calling”.
MMOC, who had her travails recently in the Dáil after some male TDs were overheard being less than gallant in their assessments of her dress sense, was mobbed by young women who wanted to voice their support.
She met up with newsreader Anne Doyle, who was dressed in a lavender and lime Libra suit and a hat by up-and-coming young designer Loretta Jordan.
The Anthony Ryan’s Best Dressed Lady award went to Suzanne McGarry from Sligo, who wore a 1960s vintage dress and a Lina Stein dome-shaped cream and black hat embellished with pearls.
The winner of the best hat was Sieglinde Mullers from Moycullen in Galway, who is a gynaecologist in Dublin.
Judge PJ Gibbons of Social and Personal magazinetold us the standard was very high this year. "Thank God, there's less fake tan about." There were a lot of disappointed faces when the winners were announced. But not for long. We overheard one fascinated man: "They get over it very quickly, don't they?"
