Speaking in advance of Tuesday night’s broadcast of the Rose of Tralee final, presenter Dáithí Ó Sé countered criticism that the festival is dated.
“People were having cheap shots at the Rose of Tralee for a long, long time as opposed to looking at the Rose of Tralee for what it really is and what it has been for a long time,” he said.
The broadcaster said the Rose of Tralee festival gives a good insight into what Irish people are doing in a particular year, and that is changing; therefore, the Rose of Tralee is changing.
“If you take a Rose from the 1970s, there’s a good chance she would go on stage and talk about being a teacher, or a nurse and probably not have travelled a whole lot. It will show what women were doing in certain years. This year you have doctors, you have engineers, you have people who have travelled all around the world.”
He added that some naysayers were “sceptical” about the friendships the participants forge during the tour leading up to the live broadcast and selection.
“I would follow a lot of them on Instagram and you’d see that they are still friends 10 years later, and going to each other’s weddings,” he said.
Ó Sé added that the “criticism has kind of gone away” in recent years. Co-presenter Kathryn Thomas agreed.
“For a long time it was almost part of the festival to slag it. And then the festival happens and everyone is like, ‘oh, how can you slag it?’ but I think it is less and less now.
“You can’t argue with the women and the stories and the confidence and the eloquence and the achievements, and as I said, the sisterhood. It’s very rare you get 32 women standing shoulder to shoulder.”
She praised the broadcast for being “three hours of positivity, confidence, vulnerability, reality, support, family diaspora. Maybe it’s a problem with the world that we live in, that three hours of goodness … is kind of hard to come by these days.”
The presenters were both unable to hint at who would be crowned tonight’s Rose of Tralee, or shed light on how the adjudication process worked. As Thomas said, there is no official criteria for selecting the winning Rose.
“I had no idea how the judging worked. I thought it was all done and dusted before the telly, but no, it all continues on, so there are four judges, and they don’t have set criteria. They are just trying to find one woman who can represent all of the Roses and can carry all of the stories of the Roses. They don’t have a checklist.”
The Rose of Tralee airs on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Tuesday from 8pm.