There's only one tent that matters on Thursday in Galway, and it's not Fianna Fáil's. For one day, the small marquee where the judging of the best-dressed ladies competition takes place becomes the hottest ticket on the course.for best dressed lady competition at Galway races ashorses come second
By 3pm, crowds of anxious women are gathering outside it. But by then it's too late. The shortlisted few, picked from the countless thousands of entrants and given white armbands to penetrate the tent's tight security, are already inside.
On the day that was in it, it was striking that the dominant colours at Ballybrit were orange and green. They didn't always co-exist peacefully - there were more violent clashes at the course than on a Saturday night in north Belfast. But the ensembles on the shortlist got on well together, for the most part. And as usual, the only danger in the crowded tent was of having your eye taken out by a hat.
Picking the winner of the best dressed lady's competition is notoriously difficult. After a careful study of the shortlist, however, The Irish Times opted for Aileen Dunleavy, who sported a classic black and red outfit, complete with corset, and a decolletage that could only be described as spectacular.
An established painter, she chose the outfit with an artist's eye. "I like the human body and I like clothes that show its curves off," she said. Which was more or less what we were thinking too.
But as always in a tight finish at a racecourse, the person you needed to have your money on was one AP McCoy. The Galway Best Dressed Lady title was the only major prize to have eluded the great jockey so far. And when his fiancee, Chantelle Burke, claimed it with her classy cream and grey silk two-piece, his domination of the sport was complete.
Even the famously single-minded McCoy had complimented her on the outfit as he dashed out the door on the way to the course (where he also won a race yesterday). "He said 'you look really nice today'," recalled Chantelle, who picked up the Christian Lacroix design for £380 in a sale in Oxford. But then the jockey also proposed to her recently on a gondola in Venice.
Racing fans worried about him going soft will be only partly reassured by the news that the wedding date has not be fixed yet, pending publication of next year's British racing fixtures.
Chantelle's €3,000 first prize was rivalled by the five-star weekend in Boston offered for the winner of the best hat competition, in which Blathnaid O'Donoghue from Ennis emerged triumphant with a lime green and pink cloche straw number bought for €325.
There are horses running at Galway that cost less than some of the outfits. Meanwhile, the winner of the token best-dressed male prize was at least dramatic. In an all-red suit, Martin "the Hat" Currie looked like Santa Claus after a rebranding campaign, and with a €1,000 cheque for his troubles, he could afford to go: "Ho, ho, ho." For the record, his hat was bought in New Orleans, the suit in Vietnam, and the shoes in "Oxfam".
The huge crowd of 46,495 - up 9,000 on 2004 - did not include Bertie Ahern, who was drawn away by political events. Helicopter pilots had their busiest day of the year, with harassed staff at Galway airport putting the number of flights in the area in the "high hundreds". Ballybrit was like south Armagh at the height of the Troubles, as up to nine 'choppers' circled the course at any one time. They were still flying in until the fourth race. And when the sky finally fell silent for a while around 4pm, it was eerily symbolic.
