THE only classes at next weekend’s Northern Ireland Festival for which combinations have to qualify are the Festival working hunter championship finals, which take place throughout Saturday and Sunday at Cavan Equestrian Centre.

The top 10 from each class will qualify for that day’s evening performance, where final placings will be decided; no placings will be announced in the ring. The show office will display a list of the top 10 competitor numbers in no particular order. Those who do not attend the evening performance will not be placed.

Gwen Scott recorded her first supreme championship success last year on John McDaid’s 2019 Irish Sport Horse gelding Tul Na Rí. The Glynnwood Cornet grey, who was bred in Co Donegal by Caitlin McKinney, will be among five or six horses Comber-based Scott is bringing to Cavan, but he has since changed hands and will compete in the ownership of Debbie Harrod.

Co Meath’s Caroline Lynch, who stood reserve champion last May on Beenandunit, has qualified two horses for both the four-year-old Festival final and the 80cm Festival final, viz her own Irish Draught gelding Rebel Bandit and the Connemara gelding Slieve Boy (by Classiebawn Hughes Promise), whom she owns in partnership with her husband Anthony.

Lynch and the Gerard Fallon-bred Rebel Bandit, a son of Rebel Mountain, won the four and five-year-old ID class at the final of the Eventing Ireland Western Region Berts Properties eventing starter series, which was held earlier this month at Galway Equestrian Centre.

Portadown’s Taylor-Lee Doyle returns with last year’s Festival working hunter supreme pony champion, Telynau Darwin, a liver chesnut gelding owned by her mother Amanda.

Doyle and the now seven-year-old by Bunbury Fahrenheit have qualified for both the Festival Mountain and Moorland 133cm final, through which they progressed to Sunday night’s finale in 2025, and the Festival 133cm final. They also hold engagements in five other classes at the three-day show.

At time of writing, last year’s reserve supreme, Colandra Meant To Be, an eight-year-old Welsh gelding ridden then by Ellie Murphy for Cherie McHugh, wasn’t listed among the entries for that section, but is in the mini part-bred flat division, where last May he claimed the title under Brylei Gallagher.