What’s it like to be a former Rose of Tralee?

What is it like to be an ex-Rose of Tralee? What happens when you hand back the sash and the tiara?

Dr Clare Kambamettu became the Rose of Tralee in 2010. She was the London Rose and had been working there as an assistant psychologist.

With an Indian father and an Irish mother, the Athy native became the first mixed-race Rose of Tralee.

She has since got her doctorate in psychology and presented a paper at the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI) annual conference this afternoon about sexuality and intellectual disabilities.

She is now working as a clinical psychologist in adult mental health services in University College Hospital Galway (UCHG).

“When I look back on the year, it was crazy. You step out of all of what you know as a life and you step into another life and then you step back into your old life again,” she said of her year.

Emotional Experience

“You’re exhausted. It is a really hectic year. There’s a kind of uncertainty because you don’t know how your real life and your Rose life will mesh together in the future. It is a very emotional experience the whole way through. None of the Roses of Tralee I have known had anything like the life they had during their Rose year before they won it.”

Winning the Rose of Tralee gave her the opportunity to move back to Ireland from London and also allowed her to change on a personal level. “The sense of self and sense of confidence that it has given me is something that is not that easy to develop and I don’t know if it would have developed in the way that it did without that year.

“Being the Rose of Tralee does pop up at unusual times. It is a very important part of who I am and it is still a big part of my life.”

Maria Walsh

Dr Kambamettu said she had never thought about the possibility of there being a lesbian Rose of Tralee before the present Rose Maria Walsh announced she was gay.

“Sexuality in the Rose of Tralee is not something I’ve really thought about [in relation to the competition]. It is not something about which people think ‘Will there or won’t there be [a lesbian Rose of Tralee]?”

“I’m delighted personally for Maria not because of her sexuality but because she is a really incredible person.”

Dr Kambamettu said a lesbian winner of the Rose of Tralee “might open the eyes of some Rose sceptics [and show them] that they don’t know everything about the Rose of Tralee, because it is challenging all those negative stereotypes, not just with Maria but for all those who have gone before.

“The people I know through [the competition] are smart, sassy, incredibly successful women who I have so much respect for. That’s a side of the festival, irrespective of sexuality, that I wish people who were very sceptical about it saw.”