DESSIE Gibson’s standout year continued at Bannow and Rathangan on Thursday where the Dromara owner’s Sort Code won the All Ireland three-year-old final.

Gibson’s latest All Ireland win followed Spot Light’s Balmoral young horse championship title. The Bannow champion next heads to the Dublin lightweight class for his delighted owner.

Thirteen of a possible field of 20 showed up for Thursday’s final, sponsored by the Bannow and Rathangan Show Society, Horse Sport Ireland and long-standing supporters Galway Crystal/Belleek China.

The choice of judges this year was an imaginative one by the Bannow committee: Wexford native and former USA team vet Brendan Furlong, who was teamed up with Clongeel Stud’s Edmund Vaughan.

Sort Code, bought at Cavan Sales, stayed top of their final line-up and moving up one place was Brendan and Thomas Tobin’s Lagans OBOS Quality entry. An All Ireland two-year-filly champion at Kildysart last year, she also took the top-placed filly prize.

Taking a Bannow final third place for a second year was John and Julia Crosbie’s HHS Cornet gelding Tinascolly Magic and in fourth was last year’s Dublin two-year-old champion, Jason Dunphy’s Vivant van de Heffinck gelding, Vivas Star.

“Fantastic, a great day,” commented Furlong, who had bought last year’s champion Bloomfield Watergate and that Watermill Swatch gelding was the recent ridden hunter champion at Adamstown, his owner’s homeplace. He felt that judging a mixed group of lightweight, middleweight and heavyweights added to the final’s unique appeal.

“It was a lovely bunch of horses, very hard to pick them. You could justify a lot of them winning,” said Vaughan, his co-judge.

His late father Denis Vaughan stood Carnival Night, sire of David Broome’s Mr Ross and another of Broome’s top Irish-breds was Sportsman, bred by Walter Bye. Incidentally, Gibson’s Bannow champion was bred by another Bye family member, Hazel.

By the Holsteiner stallion Cormint, Sort Code’s traditionally-bred dam Coevers Silver Lady is by Coevers Diamond Boy out of a Political Merger dam.

Another political merger was the visit to Bannow and Rathangan by An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

Full reports from the show will appear in next week’s paper.