It was a lovely and sunny late-April Sunday evening, and Mrs P and I were returning home in the open-top sports tourer.

We’d been on a drive out west to the Burren’s Flaggy Shore and while we’d had the usual coffee and treats to eat, I fancied something that would require a knife and fork.

So, we diverted off the M6 into Ballinasloe and its oh-so-Celtic Tiger hotel – now under new management.

A ball

Well, the place was heaving with people, and all the ladies who were mostly my side of 50 were dressed up to the nines in swishy tea dresses (I’m sure the men were smart as well, but I didn’t notice).

It turned out they were at the Shearwater Sunday Club country and social dancing event and, yes, they were certainly having a ball.

Dancing has become popular and it provides a great social outlet for people, but as I’m uncoordinated, fat and tone-deaf, it’s not for me.

The ladies get an opportunity to dress up and have a bit of fun with their dancing partners. It’s quaintly old-fashioned entertainment in this techy world and it’s good for the hospitality sector. Long may it continue.

Two friends of mine are into it and it keeps them fit as well. Don’t they say a fling’s as good as a five-mile walk?

A lady floated over to a table beside us in the buffet where I was having the roast beef and Mrs P the salmon. We started chatting, as clearly as you do at these very sociable events, and before I knew it, we were discussing rural decline.

This was a straight-talking, dancing lady who lamented the closure of peat harvesting for the nearby Shannonbridge power station.

I agreed totally with her and further fuelled her argument by mentioning Bord na Móna importing woodchip from Brazil into Foynes and then hauling the 1,500 lorry loads of it across the country to Edenderry power station. What’s green about that Eamon Ryan? Absolute madness.

On the contrary (and now on a roll), I told her with great delight, and a mouthful of sticky toffee pudding, that I’d recently read they’re demolishing a village in Germany to clear the way for a new opencast coal mine.

This was a straight-talking, dancing lady who lamented the closure of peat harvesting for the nearby Shannonbridge power station

There was a welcome short interlude at this point, while the dancer alerted the waitress to the late arrival of her pudding. Then, with that sorted and both of us on a sugar rush, we cranked up again.

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Why do we always have such mixed-up fire brigade State policies with no properly thought-out strategy? And as for Bord na Móna rewetting bogs? Oh yeah? Aren’t they erecting wind turbines on them? You can’t rewet around these. They’d blow down. But I’d prefer wind energy over solar.

Sticky toffee mess

Then the dancer and I got stuck into the sticky toffee mess that is the Forest Service.

Shortly after, her partner appeared with three slices of roast beef and bread rolls. He too was a straight-talker and a dancing dairy farmer, who sensibly milked less than 100 cows and with no intention of expanding.

I was grinning from ear to ear as he talked about the greed culture existing among some dairy farmers in their ruthless expansion – and with no time to bless themselves.

And no time to dance.

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What’s green about that Eamon Ryan? Absolute madness

Alas, Mrs P was now markedly spooning up the last of our shared pudding. Time to be going. We stood up, but it took three attempts before we could take our leave.

Now, as a tillage farmer, I’ve loads of time to dance, but this won’t happen.

A piano teacher told me 45 years ago that I had rigor mortis in my fingers. Now I think my entire body has rigor mortis.