EASTER is synonymous with new beginnings. Twenty kilometres away from the Lucan Spa Hotel, where Ireland’s fledgling dressage society was formed in 1989, is Leeson Park Avenue, where the society’s first chairperson Joan Keogh grew up.

For the young Dublin schoolgirl, summer meant holidays in the Garden County. “My father was a shoe manufacturer and his factory, off Thomas Street, kept him busy for long hours. He and my mother went to the continent for their holidays and we children were sent to a very modest farm, three kilometres from Shillelagh, owned by relations of my mother.”