Alternative Miss Ireland (AMI) is an annual beauty pageant that is open to all creatures - men, women and animals - and that raises money for Irish HIV/AIDS organisations.
Every year, amongst the traditional greenery of the St Patrick's week festivities in the month of March, AMI sets about the crowning of an Alternative ‘Queen of Ireland' through an evening of competative spectacle and gender augmentation. The pageant has a traditional structure: The contestants are put through rounds of Daywear, Swimwear and Eveningwear and are judged on Poise, Personality and Originality. But within this structure, anything goes.
There are usually about 10 contestants, each of which, to a greater and lesser extent, has elaborately constructed and skillfully imagined an alter-ego - an alternative "Miss" - to be realised through costume and performance on stage on the night. There will be song, dance, mime, props, some great make-up, some debatable genitals, plenty of nervous passion, something beautiful and something not so beautiful and, usually, at least one contestant who manages to push some kind of boundary.
The entrants, known as Aspiring Queen Cailíns, compete for the title alone as there is no prize-money. The awards are refashioned each year from the cheapest possible assembly of materials - though no less artfully arranged. The Crown is known as the Medusa Crown of Shamrocks, and this year it took the form of a large silver spike upon which a seagull has impaled itself, its red glittery guts spewing down on to the new Queen.
Apart from the obvious, the term ‘Queen of Ireland' takes on many subversive ironies. The pageant regularly ends to chants of "the Queen is Dead, Long live the Queen" - sung with great gusto in a country that not too long ago was under the colonial grip of a monachist empire. And it reaches further back into history to a time when men and women in a Celtic Ireland had equal status, and the country was ruled by many kings and queens.
The idea of an Alternative Miss, which in Irish translation becomes "Alternative Daughter", as an alternative ambassabdor for the country, tugs at the concept of the Women of Ireland, the Mná na hÉireann, who have been invoked into action throughout Irish history, most recently in the campaigns for reforms in equality and human rights status.