The Rose of Tralee Festival is facing a bit of a backlash this morning.
The Rose of Tralee Festival is one of the most popular shows on Irish TV and attracts viewers from all over the world who want to support the Roses and find out who wins each year.
If you’re watching it at home, though, you very rarely get to see what exactly happens off camera. All you get shown are 32 girls being paraded on stage to talk about themselves for a few minutes.
And now one of those Roses has spoken out about the treatment they received behind the scenes saying they were “manipulated and mistreated”.
In a comment, she posted on the main Rose of Tralee Facebook page, she detailed her experience saying:
“The Rose of Tralee was honestly the most amazing experience of my life, until Sunday morning…I, and my fellow rose sisters, did not sign up for a cheap reality television show in which our emotions would be manipulated for entertainment purposes, nor did we sign up to be treated like animals in the circus and held in a room against our will.
Cameras intrusively followed us all week and asked inappropriate probing questions; asking one girl what colour underwear she was wearing right before she went on stage, what’s acceptable about that?
I could go on for days about the many ways we were manipulated, bullied and mistreated; However, up until a certain point, the Rose of Tralee was the experience of a lifetime, every part of a little girl’s dream.
It’s just a shame that television viewing numbers became more important that the truly amazing girls that got hurt and that now have to deal with the emotional trauma of the whole, quite frankly disgusting and cruel, ordeal.
None of us signed up for a cheap reality television show and now unfortunately the Rose of Tralee is an experience I will never forget, for all the wrong reasons.
Yours,
2016 Down Rose
Fainche McCormack”
See the original post here:
We have reached out to The Rose Of Tralee Festival for a comment.
