It’s going to be a fair good show! 

07/07/2025

A fun fair forms the centrepiece of any event or show worth its salt these days, providing not just entertainment and a party atmosphere for the young and the not-so-young but also offering a focal point around which to build the festivities. Fun Day Amusements will be bringing a vast selection of popular rides and other thrilling attractions to Full of the Pipe Convoy 25. 

Mondello Park will be hopping over the second weekend of July as the trucking community and their friends, families and supporters and admirers celebrate all things trucking at the 2025 edition of Ireland’s No.1 truck show, Full of the Pipe. 

Making sure that the event has an authentic party atmosphere, Billy from Fun Day Amusements is bringing all the fun of the fair to Full of the Pipe. It’s a massive undertaking to get all the rides and attractions safely and professionally transported to and set up on site, but this is second nature to Billy and his team, who are now firmly established as Ireland’s premier fun fair providers. 

Running his own fleet of trucks – two DAFs, a Renault and an Iveco – to pull all the fairground attractions from A to B and back again, bringing family fun and thrills aplenty to events the length and breadth of Ireland, Billy feels right at home at Full of the Pipe as he knows what it means to own and operate lorries. 

When we touched base with the man behind Fun Day Amusements in the run-up to Full of the Pipe, he had just returned home from a successful weekend at the Kingdom County Show in Tralee. It’s all go, flat out, full time for Billy in the summer season and the logistics of preparing for, setting up and running a fun fair demand a lot of work and expertise, even though a lot of this takes place ‘behind the scenes’. 

“I’ll go into Mondello two days prior to the start of the show to start building up,” he reveals. “I’m on the Tipp-Kilkenny border here and will be out on the main road within 10 to 15 minutes and it’s a straight road up after that.” 

A convoy of trucks will be heading to Mondello for this weekend, but Billy’s will be there first! So what attractions and rides will he be bringing to Full of the Pipe this year? 

“We tend to swap the stuff around, but we’re going to be taking the Waltzer, which of course is the most popular machine in the world, the Round Up ride, the Frisbee with a 360-degree swing in the air, Bungees and two kiddies rides. A new thing we’re doing which is very popular is an inflatable track with eight battery-operated bumpers for kids up to age ten.” 

In addition to this, visitors to Full of the Pipe can entertain and challenge themselves at the 40-foot Big Game Stall, while there will also be a candyfloss and popcorn trailer as well as sweets and a variety of other goodies available. Billy has been running funfairs for up to three decades, so visitors will be in good hands with the best of festival entertainment guaranteed right across the weekend! 

With the number of annual truck shows in Ireland dwindling, it’s important to make the most of Full of the Pipe. Billy hopes it’ll be a busy and memorable weekend on the funfair side of things. “They are down to three truck shows, now, which isn’t great… Dualla is a big weekend, still,” he comments. “That’s a big one for me. I still go there and, since they went their separate ways, my daughter does the Tipp Truck Show with McCormacks. There’s going to be a brilliant day down at the Dualla Show at the end of August and I’m looking forward to that.” 

Generally speaking, there’ll be little or no let-up for Fun Day Amusements over the summer months and into the autumn. When there’s not a show on somewhere, there’s no end of preps and maintenance and planning / organising to be taken care of. 

“Indeed, we’ll be flat out from now into September,” Billy confirms. “It’s all go and it can be hard work. But you have to put food on the table. It’s not all plain sailing and the biggest problem of all can be the weather. We could spend a day building up a funfair and then it could lash rain all day the next day and there’s nobody there and you take it down again and it has all been for nothing. Then, when it’s too hot, they all go to the beaches, so it can be frustrating when the weather works against you.” 

The funfair will help get the party going at Full of the Pipe but in a way it’s a two-way relationship so people have to buy into the idea of a bit of festival craic and get the funfair moving… “Without a funfair, the place would be dead. Every event would be dead. They are everywhere now and you need them. At music events, shows, any big gathering, you’ll have a funfair. It holds the people and they need something like this to keep them entertained. We’ll be pulling out on the stops to make sure we have plenty at Full of the Pipe for everybody.” 

The organisers have certainly gone above and beyond to make sure that this year’s Full of the Pipe is a lively and vibrant occasion. The entertainment that’s lined up across the board is top notch and the presence of Ireland’s best funfair will bring a lot of smiles to a lot of faces. 

Billy is looking forward to meeting up with people and is ready to play his part in creating a special atmosphere. “There’ll be a lot of good attractions there and hopefully people will make good use of them. Hopefully we’ll have great weather and a great show,” he concludes. “Full of the Pipe is all about families and we have something there for all the family. U12s getting in free this year will be a big help. Look, it’s all systems go and we’re looking forward to it.” 

Full of the Pipe Truck Show Ireland is on July 12 & 13 in Mondello Park