{"id":15195,"date":"2025-08-22T02:10:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T02:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/15195\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T02:10:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T02:10:09","slug":"last-years-rose-of-tralee-says-festival-is-much-more-than-lovely-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/15195\/","title":{"rendered":"Last year’s Rose of Tralee says festival is much more than “lovely girls”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year\u2019s Rose of Tralee winner says the festival is so much more than meets the eye.<\/p>\n

New Zealand\u2019s Keely O\u2019Grady<\/a> says she once thought that the event was simply a two-night TV segment, full of \u201clovely girls\u201d saying \u201clovely things.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, her experience over the past year has changed her mind.<\/p>\n

The statement described as the 2024 Rose of Tralee\u2019s farewell message<\/a> appeared on the festival\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Keely O\u2019Grady writes that she once thought she didn\u2019t belong in the world of the Rose of Tralee and had a similar view to its critics that it\u2019s a parade of sparkles and smiles.<\/p>\n

Ms O\u2019Grady says the festival is about connection and community, and celebrating the full spectrum of what it means to be a real modern Irish woman.<\/p>\n

She says the Rose of Tralee has had a real tangible impact in providing a platform to charitable organisations including supporting children in Ukrainian orphanages who have been displaced by war.<\/p>\n

To her successor Katelyn Cummin<\/a>s, Keely O\u2019Grady advises her to say yes to everything, be unapologetically herself and make the Rose of Tralee her own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year\u2019s Rose of Tralee winner says the festival is so much more than meets the eye. New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[18,117,19,17,888],"class_list":{"0":"post-15195","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-rose-of-tralee"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15195","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=15195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}