Sir, - As Peter Meany says (September 1st), there certainly has been a "massive change" in the sociological profiles of Rose of Tralee contestants since the Festival of Kerry began in 1959, when I was selected as the first Rose.
Unlike this year's Rose, Luzveminda O'Sullivan, I had to wait almost 30 years to start my masters' course in 1987 after graduating from Trinity in 1986 as a full-time mature student. In 1959 I probably listed reading and sewing as pastimes and, as for career ambitions, the marriage bar - not abolished until 1972 - was firmly in place for those women (then always called "girls") lucky enough to get State or semi-State employment.
I may be wrong, but the "countless others" who, with T.K. Whittaker, are in Peter Meany's opinion "responsible for the modernisation of this State" somehow seem by implication not to include women like me.
Nowadays, as I list building (including block laying, carpentry and plumbing) among my pastimes, I would like to suggest that I also have made some contribution to the modernisation of this State, but Mr Meany's "modern State" still has a long way to go. If this State was truly modern, Mr Meany would at least have included one or even two women by name. On a chronological scale of modernity I believe that Ireland has just about reached the mid-1970s. He also, I think, underestimates the part women like me have played and are still playing in the massive sociological changes, albeit almost invisibly.
In my case I got involved in 1959 to "make up the numbers" in a contest which has survived due to the extraordinary efforts of all those involved, year in year out, to put the town of Tralee firmly on the tourist map. Forty years on, my sociological profile shows me proud to be modern and proven to be academically bright in a still somewhat old fashioned Ireland. - Yours, etc., Alice O'Sullivan-Rapple, (1959 Rose of Tralee),
Toger Beg, Roundwood, Co Wicklow.