The Rose of Tralee is a “beauty pageant that’s not about beauty”, this year’s winner said of how she explains the contest to her friends. New Zealand Rose Keely O'Grady said hardly anybody she knows has any idea what the contest is about. The 21-year-old Bachelor of Speech and Language Therapy student and third New Zealand winner of the title in the contest’s 65-year history, said that is how she sums up the contest.
She was speaking to reporters moments after being picked as this year’s Rose of Tralee at the end of two selection nights at the Kerry Sports Academy at the Munster Technological University (MTU). Keely succeeds the 2023 Rose of Tralee, Róisín Wiley, from New York. “The way I like to explain it to people in New Zealand, if I'm in a bit of a rush, is that it's a beauty pageant that's not about beauty,” Keely said.
“It's about ambitions. It's about aspirations. It's about self worth and talent, and it's about the strength of a woman.
“It's about celebrating a shared culture and connection and heritage that we all have, all the girls that enter the competition. That's how I like to try and explain it.” She said she did not expect to win and that she was shocked when she did.
She described her fellow contestants as “beautiful, amazing, talented women”. “I mean that from the bottom of my heart. It seems like a very cliche thing to say, but they genuinely are.
“That shock comes from the fact that it could have been any one of them, and.