Rose of Tralee 2024: ‘When nobody knew about the festival everyone wanted to come’

It’s hard to know what Mary, the original Rose of Tralee – the one in the song – would make of the Rose of Tralee festival. She was, apparently, a 19th century maid who was in a relationship with her aristocratic boss William Pembroke Mulchinock before dying tragically. She wouldn’t make it through the first round of judging these days.

This year’s Ohio Rose Aoife Zuercher works for Nasa and her party piece is vigorous Irish dancing combined with a popular Ohio sports cheer (she would have done “science”, she tells me, but “I didn’t want to blow up the place”). And she does all this at the behest of Dáithí Ó Sé, who is three times the size of Mulchinock due to 21st century nutrition, and it’s on television, something Mary would consider witchcraft. From what I know of the original Mary, her “party piece” would have been coughing sadly.

All the Roses are highly qualified. The Derry Rose, Darcy Taylor, is an assistant producer with BBC Foyle. Kerry Rose Emer Dineen is a radiographer in Temple Street Hospital. (“Break a femur, Emer,” says one banner – there are lots of banners). Tonight’s show begins with Dáithí, co-presenter Kathryn Thomas, Roses and Rosebuds (child Roses) dancing to Beyoncé’s Run The World (Girls).

“Fifteen minutes this morning with the Roses in their PJs,” says Thomas, when I ask how much rehearsal they had. Then she does the whole dance in the press room because she’s a trooper.

Then the Roses play harp and bagpipes (the heaven and hell of musical instruments) and sing and evoke emigrant ancestors and tell their own emigrant stories and do card magic and hoof it up and do sign language and make Kathryn row on a rowing machine even though that’s not her job.

Furthermore, these Roses have spent the week waving, smiling and taking photos with anyone who asks, people like John Greehy who fundraises for the Carriglea Cairde Daycare Service he attends. There’s a photo of himself with Dáithí Ó Sé on his T-shirt and he likes “when Dáithí has fun with the roses”.

Earlier that morning, in the Meadowlands Hotel, as Roses wander about wearing ball gowns with runners, I meet Dáithí Ó Sé with executive producer Michael Kealy. Kealy’s job, Dáithí says is to constantly say: “We’re 10 minutes over” into Daithi’s earpiece. “Last year I said, ‘We’re 10 minutes over’ as he was getting onstage,” says Kealy.

Dáithí has an ice pack to ice his knee, which recently sustained a bad injury, so he won’t be kneeling down. “If I do, I won’t be getting back up,” he says sadly. “I’ll be getting a piggyback over there.”

The last time I was at the festival “the Dome” was a rectangular marque at the Rose Hotel. More recently it’s an auditorium out in the Kerry Sports Academy at the MTU.

Some Tralee residents are nostalgic for when the show was held in the centre of town and there was a black-tie ball and a race meeting and people camped in fields. “When nobody knew about the festival everyone wanted to come,” says my B&B host Tim O’Keeffe.

The festival’s chief executive Anthony O’Gara, who is also recovering after a heart operation, says he’d like to see the festival handed back to some sort of consortium of local businesses in time. “I think that would be the way to go – back to more local ownership and a new generation of people.”

I meet several Roses. They’re empathetic and thoughtful and on message. They talk about feeling like princesses (the Disney kind not the autocratic nepo-baby kind) and forging bonds that last forever. In fairness, this latter assertion stacks up. Maggie Flaherty, the 1974 Rose of Tralee calls the Roses “a sisterhood … The most important thing I’ve been involved in in my life. They’re my support, my people … If you have a grandkid, if someone is in the hospital, the sisterhood is there 100 per cent.”

Primary schoolteacher Thomas Cunningham, last year’s Escort of the Year, tells me about the boot camp the escorts go through. “Bonding through trauma” he calls it. “Last night we were all in a circle shouting ‘2023′!”. (The escorts love a good chant; they sing: “Heeeeeey Roses, ooh ah, I wanna know oh-oh-oh, if you’ll be my rose” whenever Roses disembark from a bus).

Cunningham says: “[Tralee is] a place where love is in the air.” At the end of last year’s festival his fiance Paudie Ryan proposed to him.

I have a moment of self-reflection when interviewing Kerry Rose Emer Dineen at the dress rehearsal because when I jokingly say, “Can you tell me about any fighting and acrimony backstage?” she says: “Why would you want to know that?”

She says it with such genuine concern for me that I instantly start questioning my life choices. Why would I want to know that? Am I so cynical that I can’t take the Roses’ assertion of fellowship and community at face value? A volunteer explains that from the moment they meet, the Roses are given games designed to foment bonding without them realising it. “It’s quite sneaky really.” There’s no acrimony, he says.

Earlier, the nation’s escort (Taoiseach Simon Harris), drops in to the Meadowland Hotel for a summit with the Roses. I don’t know what is said in the room because I am diverted by a chaperone when I try to follow them. “One thing I’m certain of is that in that room there are 32 leaders,” Harris says, as he leaves, and it’s obvious he was getting his orders from the secret rulers of Ireland. As Beyoncé once said: Who run the world? Girls.