Clodagh Finn: It's not the Hunger Games, it's not Miss America — it's our weird, beloved Rose of Tralee

Irish Examiner

5 days ago

I can already feel the dread rise up in me as the clock ticks down to another Rose of Tralee festival.
How, in this millennium, can we still have a Lovely Girls contest, to use one of the kinder terms adopted by the sneery naysayers?
Sometimes I wonder that myself, but then the Tralee native in me takes over. Rose of Tralee? Bring it on, she says, along with the buzz, the spotlight (so rare for Kerry's county town) and the crowds, sadly also rare even at the height of the tourist season.
It is hard to envisage now but, in the festival's heyday, the town filled with so many people that you had to elbow your way through the streets. It was Mardi Gras, Kerry-style. Or that is how it felt to grow up in a place which, for one week in late August, pulsed with people, music, food and glorious spectacle.
The street festival — varied and boisterous — and the Rose competition in the big tent — controlled and curated — seemed worlds apart, but one kept a curious eye on the other. On selection night, news of the crowned Rose filtered down on to the heaving streets before fireworks burst into the autumn sky.
The festival was held later then and it delayed our return to school by a week — another reason to love it — but one year we were back in time to welcome the winning Rose. There was a surge as we rushed out of the science lab, without a hint of irony, to greet (or maybe scrutinise, we were teenage girls after all) this young woman who was only a few years older than ourselves.
She was down-to-earth and smiling. She wore a sash with the words 'Rose of Tralee' emblazoned on it — there was no sashay — yet it felt like the kiss of celebrity. And success. And it had all played out on television in our local town. It was reality TV before we had a name for it.
You could say the organisers of the Rose of Tralee festival were early adopters of a trend that would develop with such force later
Miss America was first televised in 1954, attracting a staggering 27m viewers. A little more than a decade later, in 1967, a small festival in a small town in Ireland followed suit.
What is staggering is that it is still doing so, and that it is such a hit with viewers. Here are the stats, courtesy of RTÉ: 'Across the two days of the festival, an average audience of 412,900 tuned in on RTÉ One. The show also had a 1-minute reach of over 1.3m across both nights.'
By way of contrast, last year the Miss America Pageant was streamed 1.2m times on YouTube.
RTÉ presenters Dáithí Ó Sé and Kathryn Thomas will host the Rose of Tralee competition. Picture: Andres Poveda
I'm not equating one with the other, just making the point that the Rose of Tralee Festival has shown an uncanny knack of tapping into the endless appetite for televised competition.
Far from being outdated — 60% of last year's viewers were between 15 and 34 — it appears to be scarily on trend. It's not Squid Game: the Challenge — there isn't enough prize-money for one thing — and it's certainly not the Hunger Games, but the enduring popularity of the Rose of Tralee Festival, the TV show, seems linked to the collective drive to turn everything into a contest.
There was a time when a game show and a cookery show were entirely distinct, but the edges started to blur and then the 'win, win, win' theme of the game show seeped into everything else — gardening, baking, painting, pottery-throwing, design, dancing. Pick a human activity and you will find a TV show pitting practitioner against practitioner on a channel somewhere.
Why does everything have to be a competition these days?
In some ways, the hobby or activity contests are at the benign end of the scale. They judge what a person can do rather than the person themselves. Having said that, The Apprentice, which purports to evaluate the business skills of its participants, is a study in ritual humiliation. I have heard it well-described as a 'theatre of cruelty'.
And it has given the world Donald Trump, a man who has turned world politics into a kind of dystopian reality TV show.
Next to all of that, the Rose of Tralee is a breath of fresh air. It's certainly a competition, but you can't really describe it as a beauty contest. The organisers have wisely put the emphasis on connecting the global Irish diaspora.
This week co-host Dáithí Ó Sé framed it like this: 'It's such a celebration of Irishness and Irish women, and really pinpoints what women are doing at this particular time. In the 1970s, you would have had teachers and nurses, and today you're talking about engineers, doctors and mechanics. That is what I love about it.'
He has a point. This year's Laois Rose, Katelyn Cummins, is a dairy farmer and an apprentice electrician. She has already used her selection to encourage other young women to consider a trade as a career option
Also, to the critics and the detractors, here's what she said when she was chosen to represent Laois: 'The whole experience has been amazing. I've met so many lovely girls. I've made friends for life for definite. And now I can't wait to make even more memories and friends in Tralee.'
Post-festival, many of the Roses tell interviewers that they have had the time of their lives. And, as far as we know, they were willing and happy participants.
Since 2021, the festival has been open to married women, trans women and it upped the age limit to the ripe old age of 29 to be more 'inclusive'. It also recruited a female co-host Kathryn Thomas.
Why then, does it still rankle?
And it does. In March 2022, for example, the audience in a packed Vicar Street in Dublin laughed riotously when comedians Deborah Frances-White and Kemah Bob took out their carving knives to tear the Rose of Tralee to sorry shreds?
By a surreal twist of fate, they did that routine just before turning to me. I found myself in their elevated — and very funny company — because I had been invited with the then Lord Mayor of Dublin Alison Gilliland to talk about Her Keys to the City, a joyous project that celebrated 80 of the capital's overlooked women.
But just before I began to talk about the strong, independent, forgotten women who shaped Dublin, I had to own up, rather sheepishly, to being from Tralee. The place collapsed with laughter.
And then, as now, I did my usual uneasy August dance, drawing inspiration from Deborah Frances-White, aka The Guilty Feminist, herself. As she says, her show and podcast provide a forum to discuss our noble goals as 21st-century feminists but, also, the hypocrisies and insecurities that undermine them.
She gives this example: 'I'm a feminist but … one time I went on a women's rights march, and I popped into a department store to use the loo, and I got distracted trying out face cream. And when I came out the march was gone.'
And here's what I say every time the Rose of Tralee Festival comes around: 'I'm a feminist but … I won't be saying zip about the procession of dresses, the party pieces and the patronising patter. They all say they enjoy it. And Tralee needs them. Can you please, just this once, let us have this overdue, if imperfect, fleeting moment in the sun.'