William Pembroke Mulchinock fell in love with Mary O’Connor the first time he saw her, the story goes. Mary, a poor Catholic girl, worked as a maid for the Mulchinocks, wealthy Protestant landowners in 19th-century Tralee, County Kerry. He was so smitten that he wrote a poem about her, which inspired the popular ballad “The Rose of Tralee”. “She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer,” it goes. “Yet ’twas not her beauty alone that won me; / Oh no, ’twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning, / that made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee.”
Today, in Tralee’s verdant gardens, a pair of statues embracing among the rose bushes pays tribute to William and Mary. Their legacy, though, extends much further. They inadvertently gave the world the Rose of Tralee, an Irish beauty pageant that’s not quite a beauty pageant. Every August, some 200,000 visitors arrive in Tralee to witness the crowning of a new Rose, a woman who will, for the next 12 months, embody Irish womanhood at home and abroad, and win a new car.
Officially, this is the Rose of Tralee International Festival, a week-long carnival at which the pageant sits centre stage. Founded in 1959 to attract tourists and Irish expats, it was billed as a celebration of the “aspirations, ambitions, intellect, social responsibility and Irish heritage” of young women. Today, it’s estimated that the festival generates between €15mn and €20mn for Kerry’s local economy. It culminates in a two-night variety show, screened across the world by Ireland’s state broadcaster RTÉ. The judges, veteran broadcaster Dáithí Ó Sé (whose wife was the 2008 New Jersey Rose) and co-host Kathryn Thomas, select the winner not on looks but on the ability to be a good role model and ambassador for Ireland. This year, more than half a million people tuned in. Outside the Irish diaspora, few have any idea it exists.
Thirty-two women compete in the final. In theory, that’s one for each county in Ireland. In reality, many of the Roses come from the corners of the world where generations of Irish immigrants have ended up. Each competing city or county elects its Rose to send to the finals. In order to qualify, you must have Irish heritage. Women from Roscommon and Dundalk have appeared alongside those from Newfoundland, Chicago and Rome. Where there is an Irish community, there will be a Rose of Tralee.
Originally from Tulsk, a village in County Roscommon, Glenna Mannion has lived in London for eight years. When I met her at the Irish embassy in May, she had just been appointed one of 15 Londoners competing to become the city’s 2024 representative for the Rose. At 28, she was nearing her final chance, the upper age limit being 29. Growing up, Mannion, who works as a manager in a residential care home for autistic teenagers, would watch the Rose on TV every year with her parents. They were “even more excited” than she was that she was finally part of it, she told me. “In Miss Ireland, you have to wear a bikini and all that,” she said of the better-known pageant. “I think my mam and dad would be blessing themselves.”
The London Rose of Tralee selection process is less like a competition and more like an ambassadorial tour of the capital’s Irish diaspora. This year there was a “Jig and Jive” event, a group session on self-confidence and a night-time walk for suicide awareness. Each of the hopefuls was sponsored by a local business, Mannion by Emerald Eats, the stall in Broadway Market, Hackney, that went viral earlier this year for selling chicken fillet rolls and spice bags, a wildly popular snack in Ireland. At a gala dinner at the Clayton Hotel in Chiswick, a panel of three judges crowned Mannion this year’s London Rose in front of her family and friends. She would spend the next three months fundraising and preparing to travel to Kerry, where she’d meet the other 31 women in the televised finals.
“Trying to explain to people at work what actually happens is hard,” she told me. “They’re like, ‘Oh, so it’s a beauty pageant.’ And I’m like, ‘Ah, not really.’ I always say it’s a celebration of Irish culture, heritage, Irish women. It’s only people with Irish descent that have heard of it, so it’s very difficult to explain.” But the diaspora’s attitude towards the competition sometimes differs to that of people in Ireland. “I had one or two negative comments from people back home going, ‘Oh, the Rose of Tralee, how is that still going on in this day and age?’ I disagree though. It’s a tradition more than anything. We can’t do away with a big tradition like that just yet,” Mannion said. “It’s part of Irish culture.”
Tralee is a bustling county town in the south-west of Ireland, population 26,000. It lies just north of the marshy neck of the Dingle Peninsula, at the base of an ancient roadway that heads south over the Slieve Mish Mountains. Nearby sits a large boulder, sometimes called Scotia’s Grave, the supposed burial place of an ancient Celtic queen. Co-host Thomas describes Tralee during the festival as the “land of the Roses . . . a bubble”. Parts of the town do feel as though they’re preserved in amber: the hotels decked out in dark wood and chintz, the shops selling traditional Aran sweaters made with Irish wool. At Kerry Airport, there are framed photos of Bill Clinton shaking hands with staff and kissing babies. It’s a vision of Ireland made to appeal to a nostalgic diaspora.
When I arrive on Sunday, there’s a carnival atmosphere on the streets in spite of the biblical rain. There’s live music, bouncy castles, face-painting stalls and an exhibition in the town museum that showcases a selection of 30 gowns worn by winning Roses dating back to 1959. In the windows of the pubs and betting shops are the beaming faces of the finalists. A little girl standing next to me outside the bookmakers oohs and ahhs over them while I check the odds. One of the favourites to win is Emer Dineen, the Kerry Rose. Local Roses don’t usually stand much of a chance. The Dublin and New York Roses have chalked up the most wins over the years.
“With that kind of thing, I try to keep away from it,” says Dineen, when I ask her what she makes of her chances. “We’re not really on our phones. We’re too swept up in it.” Dineen, 23, is a University College Dublin grad, a fluent Irish speaker and, inevitably, already a humble hometown hero. “I get to show off my county and meet all these gorgeous girls I’d realistically never get the chance to meet otherwise,” she tells me. “The entire south and west of Ireland has just completely rallied. And it’s not just for me. That’s what I love about the Kerry people, they’re just delighted to have us here. It’s so important for them that we’re here and it’s so important that we’re able to give a little bit of ourselves back to those people who are so excited to see us.”
Each local business in Tralee celebrates a finalist. My hotel is hosting the Perth Rose and her family. At 29, Maria Collins is enjoying her last chance to be part of this Irish tradition. Originally from Coppeen in Cork, she moved to the most isolated city on the planet a year ago to work as a teacher. There she ensconced herself within the 20,000-strong Irish community and teaches her own Irish-language night classes. “The families from Ireland that settle in Australia tend to go to the west,” Collins explains. “We have a lot of first generation Irish-Australians [who are now young parents] trying to hold on to that connection.”
The festival has helped finance Collins’s first trip home since moving to Australia, and she’s come back with her new Perth boyfriend in tow. “I never thought of doing [the competition] in Cork because I was always looking to move and to travel,” she says. “It’s hard being away from home. I know people think it’s all sunshine and roses, but it’s difficult. You have to become independent. You have to toughen up. And it’s a huge honour to come back, and represent the Irish community there.”
When I was growing up in Ireland, the TV show Father Ted reimagined the Rose of Tralee as the “Lovely Girls” competition, in which Dermot Morgan as the titular priest watched a parade of women in dowdy floral dresses and sashes, and said things like, “Well, Imelda, you’re a lovely girl!” For many, it’s this impression of the competition that has endured — one the real-life “Lovely Girls” are quick to dispel. “They perceive it as a pageant. It’s not,” says Ciara O’Sullivan, a 27-year-old teacher originally from Cork and this year’s Dubai Rose. “It’s about celebrating women.”
Certainly in the past, the Rose of Tralee adhered more closely to the Father Ted version than it does today. Originally, only women from Tralee itself were eligible to take part (in 1967, it was extended to include any women of Irish birth or ancestry). Unmarried mothers were not allowed to enter until 2008, and married women not until 2022. BBC sports presenter Gabby Logan is a former Rose, having represented Leeds in 1991. In 2014, Maria Walsh, now an MEP, revealed she was gay only after she was crowned. A couple of years ago, they got rid of the tiaras.
Back in the olden days, things were simpler. The winner, the original rules stated, should have “very good looks”, a “good figure” and shouldn’t wear glasses. She should have a good dress sense, a sense of gentility, a knowledge of Kerry and Ireland, and “sufficient strength of character to keep her end up in an argument without arousing hostility”. Most importantly, she must have an Irish accent and an “Irish face”. “Sometimes Irish girls who have been abroad, especially in England, lose this or pretend to,” it said of the former. Of the latter, it’s not hard to imagine what was implied. A look back at 65 years of the Rose of Tralee reveals a sea of white faces, even though Ireland itself has become more diverse in that period. On winning the title in 2018, Zambian-Irish radio host Kirsten Mate Maher said, “There is no ‘typical Irish woman’. We’re all different and we all come in all shapes and sizes and skin colours . . . We’re such a diverse community, and we need to embrace that.”
I’m not sure that the Rose of Tralee has embraced it. Its old-fashionedness is part of the draw. “It’s a nostalgia thing,” Tralee coffee shop owner Ash Maguire tells me of the festival. “It’s meant for tourists and Americans. They need to modernise it.” On Monday, Ireland’s Taoiseach, Simon Harris, visits the Meadowlands Hotel where the Roses are housed during the festival, sorority style, living two to a room with a curfew of 1am. In 2022, host Ó Sé told the press he’d “love to see a trans rose”, but that hasn’t happened yet. The rule is that if you identify as a woman, you can be the Rose of Tralee. In practice, though, it’s more likely that identifying as a certain type of woman means you can be the Rose of Tralee. A woman who is likely a teacher, nurse or social worker, who loves her parents and can dance a jig.
In the past the variety show was broadcast live from The Rose Hotel, but this year it moved out to Munster Technological University’s campus on the edge of town. Earlier this year, the festival company was embroiled in a protracted financial drama with American investor Richard Henggeler, whose daughter Dorothy was the 2011 Washington DC Rose. Dorothy died of a brain haemorrhage in 2014, shortly before her 28th birthday, and Henggeler and his wife Eibhlin brought her body back to Ireland to be laid to rest in Eibhlin’s hometown of Killarney. They poured €800,000 into the festival where Dorothy, who had worked for Tourism Ireland in New York, had been most happy. They also bought the 165-bedroom Fels Point Hotel in Tralee for an undisclosed sum and renamed it The Rose Hotel.
In July this year, courts heard that relations between Henggeler and the festival had “irretrievably broken down”. His investment equated to a 31.1 per cent share of the company. He alleges that only a small portion of the money he put in benefited the festival itself, with most paid out to shareholders.
In an affidavit, chief executive Anthony O’Gara said that the festival has an annual income of €700,000 and is run with the aim of breaking even rather than to turn a profit. It has sponsors, including RTÉ and Fáilte Ireland, the national tourist board, but operating costs have increased, and adjustments have had to be made. O’Gara revealed last year that, for the first time in its history, the televised finals might move to Dublin. He told Radio Kerry that the move was a distinct possibility if he could not secure more funding. Many feel this would be a blow for Tralee. “It wouldn’t work in Dublin, in a bigger place,” a volunteer told me. Last year O’Gara also announced that the festival could no longer foot the bill for street events during the festival, and the Rose Ball was cancelled. Financial responsibility was passed on to the council and local business, and the community events now take place under the banner of “Tralee StreetFest”. During the week of the festival, it feels like there’s a separation: the events for locals, and the Rose events on the edge of town for the cameras and the people flying in.
On Monday evening, the televised show opens with a choreographed performance to a Beyoncé song. The girls post TikTok dances. There are a lot of tattoos on display. It feels as though the show is flirting with modernity, a far cry from the days of the “Lovely Girls”. The overall effect is more Eurovision than Miss Universe. The phrase “the craic is 90”, roughly meaning “this is very good fun”, features heavily.
Though there are plenty of modern-day Roses without Irish accents, Irishness is embedded in every aspect of the finals. Many of the Roses are interviewed in Gaeilge. “This is massive for me to do in English,” the Waterford Rose says on stage. “My English vocabulary isn’t great.” She never had sisters, she tells host Ó Sé. Now she has 31. In the “party pieces” section of the proceedings, the Roses perform their talents, which are equally Irish. The North Carolina Rose, billed as a “Southern Belle” who idolises Dolly Parton, does a card trick. The Dubai Rose plays an Irish harp. Collins, from Perth, sings a folk tune, “Mo Ghile Mear” (My Gallant Darling).
The San Francisco Rose plays the uilleann pipes. New Zealand and Donegal both do Irish dancing. Mannion, from London, reads tea leaves. Five years ago, one woman’s party piece was the ability to open a bottle of wine with her shoe. Another year, one Rose planned to milk a cow, which unfortunately escaped backstage. The background music to it all is provided by the Garda Síochána Orchestra.
What’s most striking, however, is not how Irish it is, nor what one person on X describes as the “heteronormative camp” of the show, but how impressive the Roses are. The Ohio Rose works for Nasa and plays Gaelic football. The New York Rose, a Columbia University student, speaks Mandarin. The Melbourne Rose won the Diana Award for her charitable works. The “home” Roses seem to recognise the irony in it all, while the second-generation international Roses take the pageant far more seriously. It is, perhaps, a more important marker of heritage for those who don’t live here.
On the final night of the festival, Keely O’Grady, a 21-year-old speech and language therapy student at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, is crowned the third Kiwi winner in the festival’s history. Appearing on stage in a traditional Māori cloak, O’Grady speaks to the press about both countries’ history of colonialism, before being whisked off to be paraded through the streets of Tralee in the traditional closing-ceremony parade. She’ll get a Kia, holidays, goodies from Tipperary Crystal and €25,000.
The closing ceremony of the Rose of Tralee festival is known locally as “midnight madness”. The Roses march through the main street on the arms of their tuxedoed escorts, 32 male volunteers from across Ireland whose job it is to accompany the women during the festival, after attending a “boot camp” of mental and physical tests. There are crowds gathered to watch the parade, but just as many in the backstreets and spilling out of Tralee’s many pubs, where licensing hours have been extended. They’re celebrating the festival, but also the end of the summer holidays and an excuse to party. Rose petals drift over the crowds and fireworks explode in the sky. Later, the younger contingent drift towards the clubs. Tralee has had its festival for the year. And the diaspora have their Rose.
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