At last, crowds can enjoy the return of a normal Balmoral Show

It will have taken three years, but the Balmoral Show will be back to normal in May.

The 153rd show will be operating at full capacity again this year.

It is the first such unrestrained Balmoral since 2019, prior to Covid.

This year’s event is only two months away, as late spring and summer looms.

The 2020 Balmoral Show was cancelled, having been scheduled for a time that, as it turned out, was a matter of weeks after the peak of the pandemic.

Then last year it took place in the autumn.

There was a sense of the old Balmoral spirit at the curtailed agri-food event with a respectable turn out from the public, but it was notably reduced on a normal show.

This year the event will return to a full schedule of show jumping and see the return of sheep classes, amid many other attractions.

The Balmoral Show, then at the King’s Hall in south Belfast, kept going almost as normal through most of the Troubles and has now had to navigate Covid.

Organisers, like so many people behind major large-scale events, responded to the pandemic with great responsibility.

They did the right thing and had to accept a gap in a much-loved Ulster annual tradition in which our rural life is celebrated.

Now the Omicron variant of Covid has turned out to be far less severe than the alarmist predictions that we were hearing in the run-up to Christmas.

At last, Northern Ireland can return to some sort of normal life, marked among other events this year by the return of Balmoral to its new home in the former Maze site outside Lisburn.

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