THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
Ted: “I never miss the Lovely Girls Festival. My absolute favourite time of year. How is Miss Lovely Girl doing?”
Organiser Fr Damo: “Ted, we had to strip her of her title. We found out she’d been in a film called Stallion Farm…”
Fr Ted, chuckling: “I heard it was a bit rude, alright.”
It’s that hoary old chestnut again. That years-long debate on whether the recent Rose of Tralee Festival is more likely the parody of the Fr Ted episode than vice-versa.
“It’s an insult to young women,” said one commentator.
“The questions are inane,” said another. “I mean none of the contestants was asked about their views on Gaza or Trump. The Tralee shindig belongs in the past and should stay there.”
Not sure I agree. Although I have not watched it in years, what I do recall is an evening or two of pleasant entertainment with young women who are testimony to our worldwide diaspora. All confident and assured young women, their world their oyster.
Confident and assured (and, yes, beautiful) is Katelyn Cummins, crowned the 2025 Rose of Tralee – watched by 530,000 viewers. The young woman, just 20, from Ballyouskill on the Laois-Kilkenny border, said:
“I couldn’t believe it when they said Laois. I was like, ‘Oh my God’. I was just thinking of my mum and dad straight away. I could see them down in the crowd. I just wanted to give them a hug,” she said. What a lovely heartfelt nod to, and testimony of, her good upbringing.
An apprentice electrician – “I’m a girly girl at heart but now one of the boys” – she is “absolutely delighted to be able to represent women in the trade world”.
She believes she is “actually inspiring a lot of young girls, and hopes to continue to do so. It’s great to get the awareness out there that women can do whatever we want, and we don’t need a stigma around it…
“We don’t need to follow tradition…”
Katelyn Cummins exudes confidence and emotional intelligence. A good head on her shoulders, as they say in these parts. And, in my mind, puts paid to the notion that she and her contenders are just simply The Lovely Girls, pandering to archaic images of, and views on, women – still dancing at the crossroads.
Despite its many controversies down the years, the Rose of Tralee is, as most contestants agree, the “experience of a lifetime, every part of a little girl’s dream”. Good on them, I say, and bah humbug the begrudgers. I am as confident as they are that they will all do well in their lives ahead and I wish them such.
Meanwhile, on Liveline we had another hoary old chestnut as schools return. We heard from a woman who was concerned that schoolgirls were not wearing their uniforms as their school intended:
“It probably has always been somewhat of an issue, but I think in recent years it has gone to the complete and utter extreme, where it’s representing something other than just girls wanting to wear their skirts shorter. It’s verging on the erotica, if you know what I mean.”
(Not sure I do …)
“It’s almost reached a frenzy of competitiveness, where they’re actually at the point where you can see their bum cheeks, a lot of it, when they’re walking around.”
The woman was eager to stress she was not approaching the subject from a moral standpoint and was trying to be objective, but it “saddened” her that, after women fighting for equality and “some kind of status”, young girls – children, she said – felt like “they have to sexually objectify themselves in this manner”.
It seems young women can’t win. You are either pandering to the notion of The Lovely Girls with not a brain in your head or you are pandering to the sexual fantasies of the male by ‘objectifying’ your body and more often being ‘body shamed’ by social media. When in truth, because it’s just part of our human make-up, they are proud, and rightly so, of their emerging womanhood and their fine-toned legs.
Youth is a beautiful time to be alive.
It seems we’re skirting the issue here, when, in fact, we should be teaching our sons and young men to be respectful of, and supportive of, women, young and old, and not see them merely as candy for the wandering eye.
