HAD the Connolly’s Red Mills Champion of Champions Final been held at this week’s Tattersalls July Show, as it had mainly been in the past, there would have been an outpouring of emotion all around following the win in the amateur championship of Katie Byrne and Queens Master.

In what has been an extremely tough year for the Co Meath family, Katie, an occupational therapist in stroke rehabilitation, lifted their spirits when winning here on her mother Anne’s Irish Sport Horse mare. The combination’s multiple past victories include the riding horse championship at the 2017 Dublin Horse Show while, at the Ballsbridge showgrounds last August, Byrne and Queens Master won the Traditional Irish Horse working hunter class and were reserve champions.

A 10-year-old bay by Kings Master, Queen Master, who qualified at Glandoran in late May, was bred in Co Kilkenny by former leading National Hunt jockey, and former Junior international show jumper, Trevor Horgan. She is out of the 1989 Shernazar mare Golden Fantasy who, when trained by John Queally, won a bumper at Tralee in June 2004 on just her fourth, but final, racecourse start. She was also second in two of her three outings in point-to-points.

David Kenna, an educational consultant for the UCD Professional Academy, finished reserve with Jennifer Kennedy’s Newmarket Kilmastulla Knight on whom he qualified at the Carlow show in Raheendaw in early June. The previous month, Kenna and ‘Solomon’ finished third in a strong older lightweight geldings’ class at Balmoral.

A 2016 son of Newmarket Venture, Newmarket Kilmastulla Knight was bred in Co Cork by Brian Daly out of the dual point-to-point winner Ballymac’s Present (by Presenting). He won the prestigious All Ireland three-year-old championship at Bannow and Rathangan where he was shown by his then owner Michael Lyons, chief ring steward at Barnadown on Sunday.