The first Rose of Tralee

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1959, Tralee, in Ireland, hosted a festival to promote the town and build Irish connections around the world. It became known as the Rose of Tralee and is now one of Ireland’s oldest and largest festivals, as well as one of the most watched TV programmes. Last year, more than 30 international ‘roses’ or contestants took part, including representatives from Toronto, Sydney and Dubai. Rachel Naylor speaks to the first woman to be crowned the Rose of Tralee, an unofficial ambassador of Ireland, Alice O’Sullivan, from Dublin. (Photo: Alice O'Sullivan at the Rose of Tralee in 1959. Credit: George Doyle, Paudi Cronin (Neustock Media). From Kerry County Museum’s photo library, created with support from the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht through their 2020 Audience Engagement Fund)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and thank you for listening to the witness history podcast from the BBC World
0:08.6	Service with me, Rachel Naylor. I'm going to take you back more than 60 years to the
0:13.1	start of one of Ireland's oldest and largest festivals. I've been speaking to the first
0:18.0	woman to be crowned the Rose of Trilly, an unofficial ambassador of Ireland around the
0:22.8	world. It's June 1959 and we're in Dublin. 19-year-old Aliso Sullivan works in a bookshop
0:31.9	and is not sure what she wants to do with her life. Her dad suggests she takes part in
0:36.2	a new festival that's taking place in his hometown of Trilly in Councillor Kerry. He came
0:41.3	home one day and said that Trilly people were having a dance in Dublin and I should go
0:47.8	in for it because they were going to eventually pick somebody to go down to Trilly for the
0:53.6	festival. And what did you think when your dad suggested
0:56.9	you enter? I said oh god no. It wasn't something that I would normally do but he said they're
1:04.1	looking for people to make up the numbers and they were looking for Trilly people, you
1:08.9	know, in other words a young woman so I went along to the dance. And at that dance she
1:14.4	was selected to be the Dublin candidate or Rose as they were known. To this day she's
1:20.3	not sure why. I don't have an idea of what they were looking for. It's like picking
1:27.0	a carnival queen in the old days. Somebody who was presentable and could, you know, present
1:33.8	a cup or do an interview or something like that. How did you feel to be selected?
1:41.0	Overcome. In order to enter each Rose had to have a connection to Trilly and joining Alice
1:47.6	in the first festival which was originally called the Festival of Kerry or four other candidates,
1:53.1	one from Trilly, two from the UK and one from New York. They were all competing to be crowned
1:59.2	the Rose of Trilly. We met the other contestants at Shannon Airport and we had a cavalcade if you
2:07.7	like from Shannon Airport down to Trilly and they looked bonfires along the road. So it was
	...

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