September 3rd, 1969The Rose of Tralee festival is full of incident and surprise from the minute a brass band plays under the window on the first morning
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 7 am. 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 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 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 this 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 at the hall but over 100,000 waited on Denny Street and in the square for the results.
The Army Band, the Aer Lingus Musical Society, Fiorenza Viani Nolan and scenes from the extraordinarily successful Siamsa, the Irish Folk Pageant, all came before the announcement. And, like watching the Grand National when you have a personal relationship with each horse, the crowd could barely wait for the results.
The judges, Lily Countess McCormack, Michael Whelan, marketing director, Bord Fáilte Éireann; RB Howick, sales director, Guinness Group; AJ Walls, deputy general manager, Aer Lingus and JE Smith, group managing director, Brittain-Smith and Co Ltd were introduced by Terry Wogan.
Then came the moment every single “Rose” was dreading – 60 seconds in which to project her personality. The dictates of the song are followed slavishly, and it is firmly stated that it must not be her beauty alone that wins the title and the £1,000.
It could be called a lot of ballyhoo, but somehow it isn’t. Its sheer practical value in terms of tourism to Ivernia Southern Regional Tourism Organisation 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.
No one even attempts to drive a car down the streets at night – they would be trampled to death by pedestrians. Most people have no intention of going to bed until dawn, so the sunglasses and the stories will be out again for this morning.
Literally everyone who came here is having a good time and if that sort of thing doesn’t bring people to Ireland in these difficult days, it is quite impossible to know what will.