Lovely Girls!

If, like me, you were brainwashed at a formative age by Father Ted, achieving a clear view of the Rose of Tralee might pose quite a challenge. How I laughed at the anarchic surrealism of ‘The Lovely Girls Competition’! When I agreed recently to be a judge on the Dublin Rose, I felt uneasy about the skewed lens I’d be looking through. To my surprise, when the judging began, I found myself saying repeatedly, “She’s a lovely girl,” without a hint of irony.

A few interviews in and my Father Ted prejudices evaporated. The candidates formed a steady stream of inwardly and outwardly beautiful high-achievers. How to pick one young woman out of so much talent to represent Dublin at the International Rose of Tralee? If only the criteria were as simple as lovely sandwiches, lovely laughs and lovely bums!
As a Rose ‘virgin’, I looked to my fellow judges for guidance. They were both very familiar with the competition and its ethos. Mike Edgeworth – a dashing jet-plane pilot who took Queen on tour last year and was a regular flyer for the Beckhams – has been going to Tralee for the Rose since he was a teenager. “It used to mark the end of summer,” he says. “The last of the season’s festivals. There’d be people sleeping on the beach and you saw dawn come up every day for a week.” The other judge was Brenda Hyland. Tall, slim and glamorous, with an elegance grounded by her Tipperary farming roots, Brenda is still widely remembered as the colourful winner of the 1983 Rose of Tralee. Back then she was just joining the Gardai, where she went on to have a hugely successful career bringing sex offenders to justice – alongside working as a model and beauty therapist, and mothering her four children.
To make our task easier, the Dublin Rose organisers gave us sheets with a list of criteria under which to mark each of the “girls” after we’d interviewed them individually. These criteria were aptitude and attitude; ability to communicate; charisma and character; confidence; personality; presentation; and overall suitability. Being virtually innumerate, I quickly ditched adding up my marks on the sheets and decided to trust my intuition instead. By now, I was beginning to get my head around what a Rose is supposed to be. While the candidates were all really well turned out, external beauty is actually low on the priority list. Naturalness, openheartedness, confidence, intelligence … These qualities are much more important. (Flashes of Father Ted irony try to sabotage my earnestness here…)
According to the organisers, the competition for this year’s Dublin Rose was the fiercest it’s been in years, but after conducting twenty individual interviews, we whittled it down to three. To observe how the candidates interacted, the twenty women were then split into three groups. Each group had to discuss three questions as they sat in a circle, while we hovered around like hawks. Our questions were these: 1. What are your solutions to our economic decline? 2. Describe your ideal date. 3. When, where and through what have you grown most as a person? (The last question provoked tears and hugs of comfort in one group, which gave me a window on the kind of pressure these young women were under and the close friendships they’d forged during their many months of preparation for the competition).
By the end of the group interaction exercise, all three judges agreed that the race was now between just two.

By 8 o’clock that evening, the function room of The Carlton Hotel near Dublin Airport was flooded with supporters of the Dublin Rose candidates. Hosting the evening was Brendan Hennessy of Setanta Sports. “We’ve got twenty lovely girls here,” he told the audience, “but remember, the judges’ decision is based on interviews that have gone on all day, not just the few minutes you see of the girls here tonight. And there’s no extra points for party pieces!”
For the next few hours, we watched as Brendan interviewed each of the women briefly onstage. Many gave brilliant performances of song and dance. By the time number 20 was finished, I was keeling over with exhaustion. My mind, however, was made up. Amidst much hoo-ha, we retired to a private room to thrash out the winner.
After twenty minutes of heated analysis, we came to a unanimous decision. Hannah McDonnell is the woman we picked to represent Dublin at the Rose of Tralee. We felt that her unique presence would make Hannah a strong contender for the international Rose title. Besides having an electric personality, Hannah exudes a positive energy that comes from service to others and a very big heart.
Aged 22, Hannah currently works as artistic director/workshops facilitator with an organisation of artists with learning disabilities that she set up herself called See-Saw Theatre Company. She also teaches sign language to babies and their parents at Simply Signing in Swords, and is a relief care assistant for people with intellectual disabilities at St. Michael’s House in Ballymun. With a BA in performing arts, Hannah is waiting to do an MA in drama therapy as a mature student, and also plans to be a successful actor.
“One of my biggest ambitions is to set up the ‘Foundation for Success’,” Hannah told us during her interview. “It’s a foundation to support creativity and creative learning opportunities for children with learning disabilities, where the focus is on individual strengths, accessibility and opportunities for success. Where children who learn differently can build confidence and assertiveness and tap into their own innate skills and talents. It’ll support people with learning disabilities to be self-advocates. The core activity will be learning through exploring drama and performance.”
The foundation is one aspect of Hannah’s five-year plan to become “an international ambassador for disability.” It’s my guess that Hannah’s empathy towards disability comes from two major life experiences: having a brother with Downs Syndrome, and being profoundly dyslexic herself. Hannah also has dyspraxia, a neurological disorder that can delay learning and development, making co-ordination and fine motor movements particularly challenging for the person who has it.
It was an absolute joy watching Hannah and her family receive the news of her win. But my radar soon picked up a different feeling in the room. The downside to judging the Rose is that your decision makes you persona non grata to the large bulk of “lovely girl” supporters at the gala event. Very soon after the announcement, myself, Mike and Brendan beat a hasty retreat through a hidden door and made for the safety of Mike’s hotel room, where we relaxed after the long day over glasses of brandy.