ROSE OF TRALEE: The Rose of Tralee festival has had a tough year financially, but winner Orla Tobin has made the best of her reign. The highlight was a recent visit to Yemen with UNICEF, she tells Róisín Ingle.
The pretty woman sitting in the Westbury Hotel in Dublin with scraped back hair and mostly make-up free face is the current Rose of Tralee, Dubliner Orla Tobin. And that distinguished looking gentlemen, who is coincidentally sitting across the room with his head buried in a newspaper is former Rose of Tralee presenter Gay Byrne. "All we need now is for Ryan Tubridy to walk in," laughs Orla. And a few seconds later, as if by magic, a grinning Tubridy hoves into view. Suddenly it's like a Rose convention in here.
Despite protestations that she is jet-lagged and doesn't look her best, Tobin gamely poses for a photograph with the hosts past and present. She hasn't slept for 36 hours since she left the Yemen, where she was on a fact-finding mission with UNICEF.
No, that wasn't a printing error. This Rose of Tralee, that stereotypically twee symbol of bygone Ireland, also happens to be an ambassador for UNICEF, specialising in girls' education. "It's the best thing that's happened to me," says Tobin, and the way she says it, you'd have to be deeply cynical not to take her word for it.
It was a five-day trip. She arrived on a Sunday for a briefing about the education system in a country where one million girls never get the chance to go to school. She was also told about the practice of female genital mutilation still done in some parts of the Yemen. "In the small villages, the older women take five-year-old girls and they basically use a blade to remove every part of them that will give them pleasure. They cut off everything. And then they sew them up so tight that when they first sleep with men, the men will know she's a virgin. It broke my heart. Five-year-old girls."
Tobin spent the next couple of days in the remote coastal area of Hodeidah in northern Yemen, visiting schools and seeing first-hand the work done by the agency. Her voice is full of concern when she speaks of the cultural and social barriers which make education a luxury for many, and her enthusiasm for the work of UNICEF is catching.
"It's culturally unacceptable in most parts of Yemen for girls to be taught by a male teacher," she says. "There is a scarcity of women teachers, which means many young girls can't go to school." In a town called Dhahi, UNICEF supplied a basic water scheme which allowed children to go to school in the mornings, instead of having to walk miles to get water."
"The community also asked whether a wall could be built around the school, because parents don't want to send the girls there unless they have privacy. If the girls are being looked at, the parents don't feel safe," she says. "So UNICEF built a wall and then parents felt OK about sending their children there."
She says the state of some of the schools was appalling. "I went into one which was just a hut with a blackboard, and rocks for chairs," she says. "In another one the roof was caving in and there were stones everywhere. One of the girls said to us, 'please get us a new school' which really moved me because most of the children are so shy they hid their faces and got really embarrassed when having their picture taken. That girl speaking up really meant a lot."
The dearth of female teachers is another issue which UNICEF is trying to address, so far recruiting and training 1,000 women teachers, who are seen as role models for young girls. Tobin was amazed by how education was viewed as a such privilege in Yemen.
"I saw for myself how spoilt we are here. I am 23 and there was a woman in one classroom who was the same age as me," she says. "She has been married since she was 14, she has five children and her daughter was in the same class as her, second grade. It was only after having all her children that she got the opportunity to go to school."
UNICEF's work in the Yemen has already seen a 39 per cent increase in the enrolment rate of girls attending school in the past three years. "While poverty is a huge issue, what we want most to achieve is gender parity, so girls can get the same opportunities as boys," she says.
At the end of the trip, Tobin and Maura Quinn from UNICEF presided over a press conference in the capital, Sanaa, in front of 50 journalists, all male. "There was one other woman there, but it was packed and when a man came in, she had to get up to give him her seat," she remembers. Some of the journalists were reluctant to believe UNICEF's claims that girls as young as eight or nine were being married off. "They said 'no, at 14 or 15 maybe', but we were trying to tell them that was still too young and illegal."
Tobin - she was mistakenly named as Orla Turban in the interview she gave to a leading Middle East-based magazine - plans to do as much as possible to highlight these issues, and is hoping to run the Dublin marathon in October with some other women to raise funds for UNICEF. Despite her win last August, she kept her job with the bank and says she has made the most of what has been a difficult year financially for the Rose of Tralee competition.
"Being a UNICEF ambassador is actually more important than winning the Rose," she says pointing to the statistic that over 110 million of the world's 700 million children, two-thirds of them girls, are not in school.
"Of course winning was an honour, but then I just went back to work," she says. "UNICEF, on the other hand, has changed me and it stands out as an amazing privilege. Lots of people gave me advice about being the Rose, saying 'make it your year, take from it what you can', but I really couldn't have asked for anything better than this."