When Dott Moriarty died three years after appearing in the Rose of Tralee, her parents bought a hotel in tribute to her but they’re now in an unseemly row with organisers alleging shareholder oppression . She was one of the most popular Rose of Tralee contestants ever, a young woman with a palpable zest for life. Dorothy ‘Dott’ Moriarty Henggeler, representing Washington DC, was loved by all her fellow contestants in the 2011 pageant, and a big hit with the audience in the legendary Dome, and with those watching at home.
Sadly, though, tragedy struck just two years later. As her mother Eibhlín, who originally hails from Killarney, later movingly described in the Irish Times: ‘In October 2013, after a few weeks of dizziness, our beloved Dorothy, beautiful, joyful, now proud New Yorker and living her dream job with Tourism Ireland New York, was diagnosed with a brain tumour. ‘We could not have imagined more catastrophic news.
The next five months would be the best and the worst of our lives.’ After Dott’s death in 2014, just shy of her 28th birthday, Eibhlín and her husband Richard decided to establish a more permanent connection with Tralee. He had sold his company, Henggeler Computer Consultants, to the global security firm Raytheon for an undisclosed sum, though presumably it was very substantial, because in 2015, the couple bought the 165-bedroom Fels Point Hotel in the Co Kerry town from Nama, for €4 million, and renamed it the Rose Hotel.
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