I wish we could go back to the glory days of Gaybo at the Rose of Tralee
The Rose Of Tralee RTÉ One, Monday/Tuesday Mary McAleese’s Modern Family RTÉ One, Wednesday Prime Time RTÉ One, Thursday
THERE was a moment on Monday night, about 27 hours into the first instalment of The Rose Of Tralee, when the show ignited. Arizona Rose Kelsey Kelleher, a stereotypically earnest American who looked like Amy Adams and appeared to have undergone the usual irony bypass, had the oddest novelty act imaginable, which consisted of dressing gruesome-looking dolls in medieval clothing.
Her job was to dress the woman doll, and it was left to host Dáithí Ó Sé to dress the man. Confused, he asked what came next, and Kelsey said: ‘The tights. You’ve put those on before, yeah?’
Without a blink, Dáithí looked at her and said: ‘I’ve taken them off.’
It offered the briefest of whiffs of what the contest could be if anyone sparky arrived on stage, but they were few and far between. Dáithí knocked some craic out of Bridgette Abbott, the Rose from Newfoundland, whose talent was playing the ugly stick (I’m not making this up), but recent years have seen the show follow the template of the likes of The X
Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. Now, the pageant gives more prominence to the sob stories than to the sort of fun Gay Byrne used to generate in the glory days of the contest (I’m old enough to remember him reduced to tears of laughter by a Rose from the Connemara Gaeltacht who taught him how to curse as Gaeilge).
Now I don’t in any way mean to take away from the suffering of any of the young women on the stage, but a lot of their stories involved tragedy, and it became just a little wearisome. That said, sometimes you can be confounded.
The Carlow Rose, Shauna Ray Lacey, told how both her parents were addicted to heroin. Her father died two years ago, but her mother Angie is clean now. The birth of Shauna’s own daughter, Emmy, was a turning point, she said. I don’t know about you but when she related how Angie said ‘I wasn’t in your life but I will be in Emmy’s life’, well, it seemed like someone in the room had started cutting onions. Overall, though, The Rose Of
Tralee needs an overhaul. The format has become staid, and while Dáithí did his best, there’s only so much you can do when a Rose’s talent is taking your blood pressure. At that point, I have to be honest, I could have done with someone taking mine. And, having had mushrooms for dinner, I had to check the packet to make sure they were your bog-standard ones, because I’d swear I saw the Boston and New England Rose doing a heavy reel to Yeah by Usher.
The best idea came from a woman on Twitter who calls herself @Seylaviee. ‘I think they should change it to the Rosé of Tralee,’ she wrote. ‘Thirty-two gals get together and go on a big night, and whoever survives without puking, or texting their ex, or fighting someone, is the winner. The awards ceremony will take places afterwards in Supermac’s at 3am.’ I don’t know about you, but I’d pay double the licence fee to watch that. In Mary McAleese’s Modern Family our former President, who has become an unexpected thorn in the side of the Catholic Church in Ireland, presented a powerful documentary on the changing Irish family. At the time of the last Papal visit, in 1979, family usually meant a father, mother and any number of children. One such family, with 11 now-adult children, were featured, and the parents talked about the sacrifices they made and how they still had their faith – and more power to them. But we also met a woman who raised her now-adult daughter alone at a time when that wasn’t as common as it is today; another family with a Ghanaian dad and Irish mother, who had three religious and very thoughtful children; a blended family with children from the previous relationships and the current one; and a male gay couple who fostered a boy.
Faith played a role in all their lives, but I was struck by the binds between them and reminded, almost subliminally, of one of the most powerful messages in the New Testament: ‘the greatest of these is love’. It was on display in abundance, and far from trashing the Church, as many have accused her of, our impeccable former President just seemed saddened by its exclusion of minorities.
On Prime Time on Thursday, there was a debate about the abuse scandals in the Church, with equally powerful personal testimony from Gerard Mannix Flynn and Colm O’Gorman, both of whom suffered abuse as boys and whose hurt has been compounded ever since by the cover-ups. If this weekend’s events are to change anything, it hopefully might be that culture of omertà.
Faith and belief can and should bring joy, and they should bring it to all, now matter how belatedly.