People with red hair have gathered in southern Ireland for the Irish Redhead Convention.
Held over three days the celebrations include crowning the ginger King and Queen, competitions for the best red eyebrows and most freckles per square inch.
People think that red-heads are an endangered species but, guess what, welcome to Crosshaven because we are not.
I love my red hair.
We have red-heads from all over the world and all over Ireland. We are here, together, celebrating. This is amazing.
I’m a read-head and I’m proud.
Sometimes a red-head gets a hard time, sometimes they are teased. This is gingers proud together, fierce and freckly.
I’m read-head and I’m proud.
This is ginger paradise.
Hello, it’s Joleen. Yeah, no problem.
The last week has been completely insane, just the, the global interest in this is phenomenal. My phone has been hopping off the hook. I can’t, my fingers can’t type fast enough to answer the emails, but luckily enough we’ve got a great volunteer team who are going to help us carry through for the weekend.
So, yeah, we’ve invited a lot of interesting people, obviously besides the red-heads we’ve invited a few celebrities, so do… I am hoping that Prince Harry himself is going to turn up this weekend. Fingers crossed! But we did send him a letter to Clarance House, so who knows, will be great to see him. Or Ed Gerhad. I’d love to see Ed Gerhad.
People are actually travelling from all over the world, from Vermont in California, and from Ohio . We even have people travelling as far as away as Dunedin in New Zealand. There’s loads of Germans around and we’ve also got a few visitors from the UK, so it’s really…, you know, it’s become a global celebration of red hair, and I’m just so delighted to be able to welcome them to Crosshaven.
I’d like to become the queen of the redheads and take the title back to the southern hemisphere.
Being a red-head you’re usually the only one in the crowd. And here they’re just everywhere.
The Irish red-heads convention takes place over one whole weekend and you’ve got to do silly things like throw carrots down the lawn.
So much fun, just the atmosphere is great.
I entered the carrot-tossing competition and didn’t win, but it’s good fun, you know.
We’ve been doing competitions all day two days.
16 cms.
How long has it been since you had your hair cut?
I think… February or March.
There’s actually photo booths, that’s really nice as well, where people can come along and get their, their photograph taken to by some professional photographers.
Look at me, look at me, smile!
It’s a really, really nice experience to be here.
There’s quite a serious message just there as well. You hear so many stories of families and kids specially who’ve just been picked on, and it’s really, really sad to see that, but that’s what’s really nice about this event, you know, you’re empowering like young kids to feel proud of, of who they are and their uniqueness, that’s what I think it’s really special.
So every year we crown a new king and queen to represent us gingers and I’m kind of nervously waiting to see who gets this title because it’s a really big deal, because they will have to represent us for the whole year.
I actually can’t think of any other hair colour in the world where you’ll find such a gathering, such a kind of connection or bond. So we’ve all kind of had like an association of people who are referred to your hair, and that’s the kind of common connection that we can all kind of talk to each other about.
