GAY BYRNE has confessed that he had his doubts when he was asked to host the Rose of Tralee contest on RTÉ television in 1974, writes MICHAEL O'REGAN
“A beauty pageant wasn’t in my normal line of work, and I wasn’t too sure what Kathleen Watkins would say about it,” he reveals, in an introduction to a book marking the contest’s 50th anniversary.
“The charm of the event was that the competitors could be anybody’s daughter, sister or niece.” Byrne accepted the gig, with his wife’s blessing, and she went on to play a role in the television extravaganza that continues to attract a huge audience.
He recalls that in his last year as host, it had a television audience of 1.5 million, at 20 minutes past midnight on an August Tuesday.
That number, he notes, related to home sets and excluded viewers in hotels, hospitals, pubs, clubs and elsewhere.
"Yet during the whole time I was involved as compere and judge, I cannot remember reading a good review of the programme in any Irish newspaper, with the sole exception of Eamon Dunphy in the Sunday Independent," Byrne adds.
The book, published by the O'Brien Press Ltd, is entitled The Rose of Tralee, Fifty Years A-Blooming. It is the work of Tralee-based journalist and historian, T Ryle Dwyer, whose mother, Margaret, was a member of the 1959 committee, later serving as honorary secretary and president.
Dwyer has done a splendid job, and the book serves as a piece of social history, as well as a coffee table souvenir of an event which has endured despite its detractors.
Its origins were practical. Fifty years ago, a group of local people devised the idea to boost Tralee’s ailing economy.
It was based on the 19th-century love song which was written by a local merchant, William Pembroke Mulchinock.
“He had fallen in love with Mary O’Connor, a servant girl working for his family, who were bitterly opposed to the relationship,” Dwyer writes.
“William was packed off to India in the army to forget her, but he never did. When he returned, he learned that she had died, and he wrote the famous song.” The contest became the showpiece of the then Festival of Kerry and grew in size over the years, attracting international entrants with a Kerry ancestry.
Before Gay Byrne and television arrived on the scene, comperes included Terry Wogan, who was about to forge a career with the BBC.
Post-Byrne, comperes included Derek Davis, Marty Whelan and Ryan Tubridy.
In recent years, it has been compered by Today FM’s Ray D’Arcy.
IN THE 1990S, Byrne felt that his natural successor was Mike Murphy. But Murphy, who these days concentrates on business, was not interested.
He said that “purveying this particular Irish feminine ideal is a line that I, for one, don’t buy”.
Dwyer notes that the 1962 Rose was Ciara O’Sullivan, of Dublin, who later married the the builder and property developer, John Byrne.
In the same year, one of the visitors to Co Kerry was New York-based Mike McGlynn, an old republican who had fought in the War of Independence and the Civil War.
He invited members of the organising committee to join him for dinner at Áras an Uachtaráin with his old friend, President Eamon de Valera.
Dev showed them around the Áras and pointed to the guest room. “You know,” said Dev, “Princess Grace and five cardinals slept there.” Arthur O’Leary, one of his Co Kerry guests, remarked: “Oh my God, not at the same time, I hope.”
Media coverage grew over the years. In a page one piece in The Irish Timesin 1969, Maeve Binchy wrote: "I think it would be hard not to enjoy Tralee. It is full of incident and surprise." In 1980, the then taoiseach, Charles Haughey, met the Roses at Leinster House and invited them to Inishvickallane, his island off the Co Kerry coast.
“Be careful of those Kerrymen,” he warned.
“Many a beautiful lady before you has gone down to Kerry and never come back again.” Seven years later, back in power, he broke into poetry when he performed the official opening in Tralee.
Some of the lines read: “When I return to Kerry/Like a Roman back to Rome/I always get that feeling/ Of a man who’s coming home . . .”
Last year, there was a major change in the eligibility rules when single mothers were allowed to become Roses for the first time.
“I know some people who say they’re role models, but we don’t think a woman is any less of a person because she happens to have a child,” said Anthony O’Gara, managing director of the International Rose of Tralee festival.
Next week, there will be 50 Roses from 10 countries, a reflection of the event’s staying power.
They will be escorted by unattached men who are, according to the recruitment criteria, complete gentlemen but with a wicked sense of humour.
While lampooned by some of the critics, television viewers will, no doubt, vote with their remote controls in their thousands.
The event has had its local benefits, which was the main aim a half-century ago. Dwyer, in his epilogue, notes that it “put the town on the tourist map and vitalised a neglected part of Ireland”.