The new, smaller Rose of Tralee festival is better for Kerry

IF some of the owners of Ballybeggan Park have their way, today’s race meeting will be the last ever held at the track in Tralee, where there has been horse racing since the 1700s.

A meeting of the shareholders has already been called for September 10 to vote on a proposal to terminate racing at the track.

Some of the shareholders apparently wish to cash in and sell the place for housing sites. Last year they closed a nine hole golf course in the centre of the track.

In order to boost the race meeting in 1957 a carnival was set up and it was a great success. Two years later some business people decided to expand on the concept and they came up with the idea of the Rose of Tralee, with entrants from New York, London, Birmingham, Dublin and Tralee. From that five it grew. The aim was to put Tralee on the tourist map.

During the week Siobhán Hanley, the chief executive of the Rose of Tralee Festival, asserted that "over 200,000 visit Tralee, over 750,000 watch the Rose selection on television and some 30,000 people outside Ireland run Rose selection centres around the world".

The figure for those watching on television was probably a conservative estimate. Even though the begruders may slate the television programme, as they do every year, the initial indications are that the audience was up again. Those who watched the programme can make up their own minds about it. God only knows what the TV knockers will say.

Year after year they usually pan the programme as they did when Gay Byrne was presenting it but each year the ratings were the highest for any Irish television programme. In 1979 more people watched the Rose of Tralee than watched the Pope in Galway or Phoenix Park. (Of course, more people gathered in person to see the Pope than anyone since Daniel O'Connell, when there were more than twice as many people living on this island. It stood to reason that if there were so many people watching the Pope in person, they could not be watching television, so the viewing figures were naturally lower.)

Seasoned attendees of the Rose selection stated that this year had the best atmosphere ever in the Dome. People seemed virtually unanimous in praise of Ryan Tubridy's handling of the programme. It was certainly a mammoth task, especially for his first television programme.

He was following in some illustrious footstep. His predecessors as presenters were Kevin Hilton, Terry Wogan, Michael Twomey, Brendan O'Reilly, Gay Byrne, Derek Davis and Marty Whelan.

Terry Wogan recalled in his memoirs that he was accompanied by his wife Helen, who refused an dance invitation from a young man. Much to Terry's amusement the youngster replied: "Ah, well, you're too old for me anyway."

The parade this year had a great atmosphere and tremendous colour. It began on time and the children watching seemed intrigued. In other years it started so late that by the time it got going, there were a mass of tired, cranky children and even some crankier parents.

The parade was led off by a circus elephant, which made a substantial deposit at Moyderwell Cross, prompting one local wag to describe the result as a new roundabout.

Some people have been suggesting that the crowds in Tralee were down. If there were the 200,000 which the festival's chief executive seemed to be suggesting then there must have been two million people at the event 30 years ago. Her figure was as absurd as the 30,000 who supposedly run the festival's centres abroad.

The festival has changed over the years. It was the first real festival in this country and it has been a victim of its own success. If one were to judge it by the crowds that it attracts to the town now in comparison with earlier years, then one would have to describe it as disintegrating, but that would be unfair.

It no longer has the throngs on the streets, with the hawkers and heavy drinking, but then this is a time when that has its positive aspects, because there was no sign or indication of drugs, apart from alcohol and tobacco. Parents were able to allow their children to wander the streets without fear.

The festival probably makes a greater contribution to its original aim of promoting tourism in the area than it did when the crowds were massive. Times have changed and so has the Rose of Tralee festival.

INITIALLY everything run by the festival was free. It started with a budget of just £700 and the biggest expenditure was bringing a sheepdog owner over from Wales with his dogs. This was before the advent of television in the West, so most people had never seen sheep dog trials.

Farmers from all over Kerry thronged into Tralee. In those early years, it was easy to introduce something new that Kerry people had not seen before.

The festival paid Fossetts' Circus to put on shows free in the town park. The festival club was also free. Although entry was supposedly by invitation only, it was free to get in and the drink was also free. It did not open until the pubs closed at 1am and the booze, which was donated by the suppliers, was rationed for each night. The brandy would run out first and then the whiskey and the stout was inevitably the last to go. The drink ran out in the order of price, from the most expensive to the cheapest.

Within a few years the festival club became so famous and popular that it became dangerous at the doors as so many people tried to get in. It was therefore decided to sell tickets to control the door.

Initially the drink remained free, but it became so difficult to get a drink in the maul that inevitably developed at the bar that they decided to charge for it just to keep order.

The same kind of thing happened with the free circus. So many children went for the first show and stayed throughout the day that other children could not get in. It was therefore decided to charge a nominal entry fee, as an excuse to empty the tent between shows, so that other children could be assured of a seat.

In 1970 the festival was held between the outbreak of the Arms Crisis and the start of the Arms Trial. Charlie Haughey, Seán Lemass, Brian Lenihan and Des O'Malley were all present. The Special Branch reported seeing Transport Minister Lenihan and Minister for Justice O'Malley talking with Haughey.

In those days the festival attracted enormous crowds for the whole week.

In the early years it was billed as the Folk Festival of Ireland. The Wolfe Tones and Teddy Fury and his sons made a name for themselves at the festival. Indeed the first time the Wolfe Tones played on radio was when Donncha Ó Dúlaing taped them for RTÉ's Munster Journal at the 1963 festival.

They were not singing A Nation Once Again but The Sash. Times have changed.