Story by Hannah Rosenberger
Kathryn Wright almost looks as if she’s just won a beauty pageant, standing on a small stage in a long, elegant, forest green dress, with a white sash placed around her torso and a giant bundle of flowers in her arms.
But she’s in a dim, rowdy Irish pub in Charlotte instead of a spotlit auditorium, and the seven other women on stage with her are all chanting her name with as much enthusiasm as if they’d won themselves. Any of the other women on stage with her — as well as any of the women who once stood on a similar one — would be quick to correct you if you called it a pageant.
Wright isn’t a “pageant girl.” She’s the newly crowned 2024 North Carolina Rose.
The Rose of Tralee International Festival is a festival based out of Tralee, Ireland — a small town in Kerry County along the southwest Irish coast.
For more than six decades, Irish communities all over the world — from Dublin to Dubai — have sent a representative to Tralee for a weeks-long tour and festival in August. At the end, the festival culminates in the crowning of the Rose of Tralee, based on extensive interviews, application questions, community interactions — and most importantly, a woman’s connection to her Irish heritage.
This year, Wright will be among them, the first time a North Carolina Rose has represented the state at Tralee since 2018. But the Rose of Tralee is more about forming a strong community of Irish women than the crown itself.
“It represents the wit and intellect and ambition of women,” Wright said. “And I love the idea of representing North Carolina, and especially women who maybe didn’t grow up inundated in the community but that grew into it as they’ve gotten older. It’s really important to me.”
The Rose of Tralee in North Carolina
The woman crowned the Rose of Tralee serves as an ambassador for the country of Ireland throughout the following year.
Any young woman aged 18-29 who has “Irish birth or ancestry” is eligible to enter, if they have a local Rose Centre — the type of community-based organization that runs events like Sunday’s Rose selection in Charlotte.
Kelly O’Doherty, a former New York Rose, established a Rose Centre in North Carolina in time for the 2013 selection, recognizing a growing Irish community in the state after she’d relocated there.
Jessica Heinrich (then Jessica Giggey) was selected as the first ever North Carolina Rose that year, to her utter shock. She’d always known she had Irish heritage — thank you, pale skin and freckles — but she hadn’t known about how recognizable the Rose of Tralee experience would make her until she traveled to Ireland for the 2013 festival to represent North Carolina.
“Going home the next day after the festival and after my stage night — people recognized me in the airport,” Heinrich said. “And I’m like, ‘What?’”
Though the festival is now a massive televised event in Ireland, it has its roots in a combination of Irish events — An Tóstal, a national series of Irish festivals started in the 1950s as a way to attract tourists during the off-season, and County Kerry’s Carnival Queen tradition, which was reintroduced just a few years before the first Rose of Tralee selection in 1959.
“Tradition is everything to Irish people,” said Chantel Cassidy, the 2015 North Carolina Rose and the current director of the Rose of Tralee North Carolina Centre. “We do it through song, we do it through poetry — we’re natural storytellers. And the Rose of Tralee is a story that has really evolved into this massive festival that celebrates women from all over the world who are somehow connected to Ireland.”
This year, that tradition has brought eight young women to Charlotte after months of Zoom meetings and preparation.
After hours of individual and group interviews — where the judges asked the girls about Ireland, current events and their futures — they congregated at Connolly’s on Fifth, an Irish pub that was Kathryn’s sponsor for the Rose of Tralee event.
One of the judges carries Poppy Rosborough, who’s stuck on crutches thanks to a tumble from her position as a flier on the UNC-Wilmington cheerleading team, up the stairs to the top floor of the bar. Maggie Mae Whittemore — a former “traditional” pageant queen who, at 29, wanted to take advantage of her last chance to enter the Rose — pours a perfect pint of Guinness. Olivia Hewett and Quinn Tobin, both still underage, don’t take a pint but do start dancing behind the bar.
Wright, a graduate student in international higher education at Boston College, hadn’t gotten to meet any of the other women in person yet because her coursework out of state had gotten in the way. But conversation flows between the eight of them as naturally as if they’ve known each other for years instead of months.
“I didn’t know them really before today,” Wright said. “And now I feel like I know such an intimate side of their culture and heritage, which has been really cool, and their ambition and what they want to do.”
Perhaps Hewett said it best.
“I’ve made best friends for life in here. For real.”
In preparation
Two hours before the main event, moms plug in curling irons as the Rose nominees dab on lipstick and eyeshadow. Grace Mallo tugs on her Irish dance shoes — a cross between tap and pointe shoes — and holds her phone up to her ear, tapping her feet in time with her music.
She’s been Irish dancing since she was 10 — even competing at the World Irish Dancing Championships in Belfast, Ireland, in 2022 — but that community has never been about “being Irish,” she said.
“For a lot of us, St. Patrick’s Day is our favorite holiday because of all the performances we do,” Mallo said. “But outside of that, we don’t go exploring Irish history or Irish current events — we focus on the dancing. So, to explore that has been really cool, and to meet other girls who are not Irish dancers, but who are also Irish.”
Caroline Hewett, Olivia’s mom, fidgets with the pins in her daughter’s hair and asks if anyone needs extra false eyelashes.
Hewett was born in Manchester, England, but she spent her childhood visiting her mom’s family in Dublin — and watching the Rose of Tralee on TV, perched on the couch with her mom, a sheet of all the Roses’ names in their hands.
“For me to see [Olivia] doing it — it’s unreal,” her mom said, sniffling. “I’m going to start crying now. I’m very proud. I’m so amazed at how strong and confident she is.”
Slowly, the bar fills up with sparkling floor length gowns, elementary school-aged girls — the event’s Rose Buds, who are each matched with one of the Rose contestants for the evening — and spectators, mostly family and friends.
Wright’s family takes up the whole back corner of the bar, waving posters with messages from her family over in Ireland, where she has dual citizenship. She’s been thinking about the Rose of Tralee for a long time, thanks to her cousins and her time studying abroad in Dublin when she was in undergrad at UNC-Chapel Hill.
And now, it’s time. At 6:30, the three judges take their seats at the corner of the small stage.
The final selection
Maigan Kennedy, the 2016 North Carolina Rose, was one of the judges for this year’s selection. Kennedy said she and the other two judges had done some initial evaluating based on the women’s applications, submitted back in the fall, but they had learned a lot about each woman throughout the day, seeing them interact with each other during interviews and brunch.
During the final selection event, each girl was asked a few interview questions on stage based on her application. Then, she had the opportunity to perform a “party piece” — more for the audience’s entertainment than anything else, giving the judges an opportunity to mark their official scoring sheets from the Rose of Tralee based on the on-stage interview.
Mary Schrader — a UNC-Chapel Hill master’s student in library science — performed a poem she’d written about her cultural connection to her Irish heritage. Emilyann Marsh — who has her name in the credits of four Marvel projects for her visual effects work — deftly whips three teal hula hoops around on stage. Mallo performed an Irish dance to Taylor Swift’s “The Man.”
Wright, laughing from the stage as she explains that she could neither dance nor sing, ropes the emcee into picking a card for a magic trick.
“It just came down to which representative did we think could become the next International Rose of Tralee,” Kennedy said. “Not just who best represents North Carolina at this time, but go all the way.”
For them, that was Wright. Now, she has to prepare for her trip to Ireland in August, where she’ll meet the other Rose representatives and go on a tour around the country.
There, she’ll do it all again.
“It’s unreal. I don’t even know how to explain it — this is something that I’ve talked about and dreamt about for several years now, and I never thought I’d actually be here,” Wright said. “There’s no words.”
