Sir, – By concentrating on the Rose, your correspondent from Galway newspaperletter-writer (August 17th) misses out on the element of celebration of the sense of place that the Rose of Tralee Festival is.
The inauguration of an annual selection of a Rose gave a focus to Tralee Race week and put Tralee on the tourist map. Its annual celebrations of racing, street carnivals, fireworks, live music, glitter and merriment set in the “beautiful Vale of Tralee” beside the magnificent scenery of Tralee Bay continues to attract visitors long after the racecourse went the way of modern development.
The festival is a huge celebration of the sense of place of the town of Tralee and its hinterland and amply fulfils the aims of those who gathered together in Harty’s pub in the town in the grim and gray late 1950s to plan the first of the now 57 years of the Rose International Festival.
Never thinking of myself as “a lovely girl”, I was selected in my “lovely” borrowed frock in 1959 to be the first of a long line of modern Roses of Tralee.
I am looking forward to being in Tralee this weekend to celebrate the place, the festival, and all those who work so hard year after year to make it such a continued success.
Part of that work is done by those who put aside their ordinary lives to dress up and be on view, and appear on stage at the Dome, live on TV to a huge audience. Elsewhere around Ireland at race meetings, horse shows and all kinds of community events, “best dressed ladies” are selected and photographed and are never expected to speak other than to give the brands of their frocks, shoes, hats or stylists. The Rose of Tralee is far more thoughtful and significant than those pictures of 2016 womanhood. – Yours, etc,
ALICE O’SULLIVAN
RAPPLE,
(1959 Rose of Tralee),
Roundwood,
Co Wicklow.