FROM THE ARCHIVES:Maeve Binchy wrote the rule book for attending the Rose of Tralee festival. –
JOE JOYCE
THERE ARE quite a few rules if you are to attend your Kerry Festival properly. Firstly, you must boast every single morning that you got to bed at 7am. You must wear sunglasses and swear that you will never drink again. You tell everyone that all the fun was in Brandon or Benners, or The Grand or The Imperial; or alternatively you tell them that these places were like morgues. Morgue is a good word.Everywhere that doesn’t provide instant entertainment and all-night activity is a morgue. You talk confidently about the New Zealand “Rose” or the Limerick “Rose”, and when the results come out you say you have been saying this all week, but nobody listened to you. You say that it is ridiculous to pay £1 to go to the festival club, but you go every night.
I think it would be hard not to enjoy Tralee. It is full of incident and surprise. The very first morning a brass band plays music under your window, at such a pitch that you have to sit up in bed and wonder are you dead and in hell. If you go out quietly to buy a packet of cigarettes the shop could be full of mummers or biddy boys, with masks and great lumps of straw sticking out of them.
All pubs have extensions to 1am and people literally do walk around, glass in hand, from one to the other looking for friends whom they lost in the activity. There are stalls selling crubeens, chips and hamburgers, and these are like ambrosia at 1.30 in the morning.
There are Mercedes and Alfa Romeos outside every hotel, there are teenagers in sleeping-bags around the parks. There are dozens of young hopefuls with guitars coming into the pub, there are groups of German dancers in Denny street whirling around at unlikely times – like noon. There are huge coloured lights all over the town, and searchlights and fireworks late at night in case the illuminations aren’t enough.
The 23 “Roses” looked so well when they came out on the stage in the Ashe Memorial Hall last night that no one could believe they had been here since Saturday following an impossible schedule of public appearances and private informal get-togethers with the judges.
These must have been more unnerving than any amount of official work, since a “Rose” is chosen as much on her personality as seen over three days as on physical appearance on stage. There were 1,000 prized places in the hall, but over 100,000 waited on Denny street and in the square for the results.
It could be called a lot of ballyhoo, but somehow it isn’t. It’s sheer practical value in terms of tourism cannot be overstressed. Even the jaded yawners who have known all the festivals are not so jaded and yawning. The Tralee people have the unusual spectacle of seeing their town go mad. Most people have no intention of going to bed until dawn so the sunglasses and the stories will be out again for this morning.
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