Articles > Country Fashions

Extract from 'The Craic'
The famous Rose competition, the taxi driver who drove me into Tralee told me, was supposed to be more about personality than looks. Last year one of the judges had stood up in front of the assembled guests and said, “'Tis not a beauty contest,” and some wag from the back of the tent had shouted, “We can see that.”

On my last day in Killorglin, Sheila's husband Michael had taken me aside and told me that Tralee was “awful dangerous now.” There'd been a murder at last year's festival, a man had pulled a woman down a lane and knifed her, and then there were muggings and stabbings, and it was mainly because of the drugs. So as I headed out of my hotel and down Tralee's narrow main street, I looked cautiously around me. The usual loud music rang out from the pub doorways, and there were a number of rather over-refreshed jaywalkers, but it was hardly Alphabet City.

In a narrow town house opposite the Festival 'Dome' (a huge plastic marquee by the main road out of town) I found the press office. Liam, the press officer, had a grizzled salt-and-pepper beard and looked as if he'd been hammering out pieces with two fingers on an old typewriter since the late 1960s. The Rose of Tralee was still RTE's number one programme of the year, he told me, attracting a million viewers throughout Ireland, worth £20 million in passing trade to Tralee. From an idea to generate a bit of business for the town it had become possibly Ireland's premier festival, financed by companies that were entirely blue-chip, Guinness, Eirecell, Ulsterbank…

He broke off the PR spiel to let out a deep yawn. Sorry. The problem they were all fighting, him included, was lack of sleep. In the last few days the Roses and their entourages had progressed from the Curragh Racecourse outside Dublin, to Waterford, to Lismore Castle, to the opening ball here in Tralee. They were all exhausted.

Liam picked up a press release containing the Roses' individual details. They had to have Irish backgrounds, of course, but it could be from four generations back. Last year they'd even had a black Rose, from Paris. This year there were all the usual Australian and American Roses, six British Roses, and one from Dubai! As we leafed through, we went off-the-record. This one's claim to fame was being at college with Clinton's daughter ('who fecking cares'), this one had great legs…

But it was - Liam's enthusiasm suddenly seemed genuine - a pretty incredible event. The Dome was basically a concrete carpark with a tent on top, and tonight they were producing a fashion show with clothes from the House of Rochas in Paris, and tomorrow the programme that would top the year's ratings…

I saw what he meant that evening, when, freshly accredited with a press pass whose photo made me look like the booziest of Irish reporters (surely I wasn't that fat already; tomorrow I gave up white pudding), I attended the opening fashion show. On the concrete under the rows and rows of plastic chairs you could still see the white car-space lines.

Above us the TV lights swayed precariously beneath the flimsy-looking blue plastic sheet that was the roof. But never mind! The place was packed. The cameras would never see the floor, the Exit arrows, nor yet the dress-sense of the crowd. The Roses, in two glamorous rows by the catwalk, were enough of a feast for any lens.

The evening began with four guys in sharp suits doing a not half-bad imitation of a black dance troupe. We moved rapidly on to a parade of costumes from Ireland's top boutiques and designers. Please put your hands together for Carraig Donn, Bridge Street, Tralee (Quality Fashions and Knitwear); Chic Boutique, Listowel (Fashion House, Designer Outlet); Bren-mar Jon Knitwear, Kenmare (Made-to-order Coats, Suits and Separates).

The posse of gorgeous females modelling these creations came from a Limerick agency, and what they lacked in haughty, dead-eyed stares and heroin-chic pallor, they more than made up for in natural good looks. Give me Maire from lrishtown over Stella Tennant any day! In addition to the girls, there was one stately lady of middle age, representing perhaps the aspirations of the majority of the women in the hall. Sadly, there was no one to offer a realistic fashion fantasy for the two pug-like old dears on my immediate right, their lips set in a downward grimace that could have been envy, approval or a stoic nostalgia.

For some reason our genial DJ host took great delight in taking the mickey out of the two male models, James and Walter, who, unlike the girls, never ventured out on to the catwalk without a prop. First, they came with mini-bottles of Perrier, then with a book (which was half-heartedly perused), now they sauntered past, each with a mobile phone. Reaching the end they tapped out a number, stepped back as they instantly got through and stood chatting. Then - hey! - bumped, bottom to bottom, into each other. Well goodness, what are you doing here?

This little vignette brought howls of laughter from the crowds and an all but straight line on the mouths of my two neighbours.

“D'you think you might just give them a round of applause, ladies,” gurgled the DJ, "they're ever so shy."

Up by the bar the Roses' escorts jostled like colts in their identical black dinner jackets with their identical shorn hair, sipping creme de menthes as their eyes followed the return of the lovely young models (now in combination yellow and grey trouser suits from Fashion World, Castleisland). “Where would you wear an outfit like that to now?” observed Eamon, who was a pig farmer from Adare, Co. Limerick.

How had he got to be an escort, I asked him. The first year, he explained, you just applied. The second, if you had behaved yourself properly, you got asked back. The interview was pretty informal. As long as you had two arms and two legs. He laughed.

Behaving yourself properly, I asked, presumably meant sticking to the rules, not getting involved with your charge? It also meant - look, there was one of the American escorts who just didn't know how to do it. He was smothering his Rose on the first night. Like, he was standing outside the girls' toilets waiting for her. Eamon and his fellow escorts had told him to ease off a bit, and he'd gone apeshit and complained to the organisers. Said he was behaving like a perfect gentleman and what were they talking about. “Typical Yank,” said Eamon, contemptuously. “He was right, and the rest of us were wrong.”

Eamon's Rose was from California. That was her over there, with the tan. She was half-Indian, in fact. She was beautiful, wasn't she?…

Articles

• More from Mark McCrum