Katelyn Cummins has been named as the 2025 Rose of Tralee, becoming the first Rose representing Laois to take the title. <\/p>\n
The winner was crowned on the second selection night on Tuesday at the Kerry Sports Academy at MTU.<\/p>\n
The 20 year-old apprentice electrician was in tears as she received the news.<\/p>\n
Her first words were: \u201cOh my God. \u201c\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked who she wanted to thank, she hastily said \u201cMy mum, my dad . . . and 31 girls behind me.\u201d<\/p>\n
It came at the end of two selection nights of the Rose of Tralee International Festival which were aired live on RT\u00c9 from the Kerry Sports Academy at the Munster Technological University (MTU).<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s winner succeeds the 2024 Rose of Tralee Keely O’Grady.<\/p>\n
In her farewell message, the former New Zealand rose described her past year as \u201cthe most exciting ride of my life\u201d and said the festival itself is all about \u201ccelebrating the full spectrum of what it means to be a real modern woman\u201d.<\/p>\n
She advised her successor to \u201csay yes to everything, be unapologetically you, laugh loud, sing louder\u201d.<\/p>\n
She also said \u201cthe magic is in the sisterhood\u201d.<\/p>\n
More than a million of viewers are expected to have tuned in over Monday and Tuesday night, with the last night usually getting more than 500,000 viewers on RT\u00c9 One and the RT\u00c9 Player.<\/p>\n
The four-person judging panel that picked this year\u2019s Rose of Tralee were former Rose of Tralee Clare Kambamettu, RT\u00c9\u2019s Nuala Carey, fashion designer Don O\u2019Neill and Aisling Murphy of sponsor Murphy\u2019s New Homes.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the evening, co-presenter D\u00e1ith\u00ed \u00d3 S\u00e9 brought out a surprise birthday cake for Limerick Rose Leah McMahon\u2019s daughter Ella, who was eight.<\/p>\n
She had attended the festival but had not seen as much of her mother due to the 29-year-old\u2019s busy schedule and the audience in the MTU venue sang Happy Birthday to her in what was one of the highlights of the evening.<\/p>\n
Asked what the contest means by co-presenter Kathryn Thomas, Leah later described it as a celebration of \u201ca sense of empowerment and fulfilment\u201d.<\/p>\n
The financial planner added: \u201cWe need festivals to celebrate women. We are not asking to be more, we are just asking to be on the same level.\u201d Among those to feature in this year\u2019s contest were 32 roses in total, who included four mothers, a cancer survivor, a stroke survivor, a diplomat, a number of academics and financial consultants.<\/p>\n
As well as being crowned this year’s rose, this year\u2019s rose also wins a world travel prize valued at \u20ac25,000 and gets the use of a \u20ac40,000 Kia Niro Plug-in hybrid for the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Katelyn Cummins has been named as the 2025 Rose of Tralee, becoming the first Rose representing Laois to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,888,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-10442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-featured-news","12":"tag-featurednews","13":"tag-headlines","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-latest-news","17":"tag-latestnews","18":"tag-main-news","19":"tag-mainnews","20":"tag-news","21":"tag-rose-of-tralee","22":"tag-top-stories","23":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}