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College Tribune | September 30th 2008
Features News
The room is set. RTÉ are ready. The cameraman is prepared with an ‘ultra-wide’ lense. In the middle of it, she waits, blonde and diminutive, slightly bemused by it all. Her dress is low-cut, but not overly so. The subject is Claire Tully, the holder of the slightly dubious honour of being Ireland’s first lady to appear topless in The Sun’s infamous Page Three. “I entered a competition in FHM, ‘High Street Honeys’, just on a whim. It was kind of to see if I could get into the top 100. I’d seen pictures of the top girls and thought ‘I could do as good as that’. Why not? It would be something that I could show the grandkids in years to come and say ‘Hey, I was hot – ages ago’”. However Tully isn’t quite your average Page Three model. Collecting the maximum 600 points in her leaving certificate, the Lucan native opted for science in Trinity College. Following her graduation with a first class honours, specialising in biochemistry and immunology, she interviewed for a PhD position in Oxford. “I am a scientist. I was born a scientist. I love being in that environment all the time. I’m still in touch with people in college, who talk sciency things, we don’t talk about glamour modelling. So that’s very much in me and that’ll never go away.” However, combining a modeling career with completing a college degree wasn’t all plain sailing. Tully complains of being bullied at every stage of her educational life. “My friends were always individuals, I was never part of a group. I was picked on a lot in primary school, in secondary school and in college. I experienced it the whole way through. “There was a guy in my year who really didn’t like me from first year on. Just didn’t like me. I went and didn’t know anybody, so I tried to make friends, but in lectures they’d be kicking the back of my chair or throwing papers at me. It got to a point where they were like – ‘Go away you bitch, everybody hates you, nobody likes you, just fuck off’. They were pushing me in the corridors.” Tully persisted with her glamour work, and following appearances on Page Three, featured on RTÉ’s reality TV show Fáilte Towers and now writes a regular column, ‘luscious’, for the Irish Sun. She has traveled a rarely trodden path to where she is now, but is skeptical it will open the door for legions more Irish girls to enter the ‘industry’. “It’s not an economical thing for students to get involved in. Work varies from week to week and it’s very difficult to get in to. “There are so many girls you are in competition with. You have to look your best at all times. You can get a phone call in the morning, maybe at twelve, and they want you at three o’clock. If you haven’t always got your hair, tan, waxing and nails all done, it’s not going to happen.” The glamour model industry is a competitive business, with numerous players both reputable and otherwise. According to Tully, numerous impressionable young ladies are taken advantage of, partly by unscrupulous characters and partly by the pressures of modern society. “With the likes of Bebo, there’s a huge number of girls who pay money to get glamour shots done to display on their profile. I don’t see the point of it, since I went into this as a business, to survive. Opportunists get the chance to basically perve on people, and earn money doing it”
■■ Sex appeal sells: Glamour model Claire Tully (left) and her Irish Sun headlines
Understanding model behaviour Irish glamour model and first-class honours student Claire Tully speaks to Simon Ward prior to her appearance at Lawsoc’s glamour model debate, about mixing education and the mass media “I was a rare exception in that I was approached by a huge company. I was saved from all that. I may have missed all that, but I can see it, and this is where the bad image of the glamour modeling industry – that it takes advantage, comes from.” Claire Tully entered the surprisingly entertaining reality TV world of Fáilte Towers, with the goal of
It got to a point where they were like – ‘Go away you bitch, everybody hates you, nobody likes you, just fuck off’. They were pushing me in the corridors.”
raising money for breast cancer charities. However, not just one, or two, but three Irish charities politely said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to her altruistic overtures. It would be inconsistent to accept money from someone who has made a living selling her assets, and to use that cash for cancer research, they claimed. “I tried so hard to find a charity. Some charities found it more offensive that I took off my top than the actual disease that is both devastating and destroying. I didn’t have the foresight to see the see (the rejection) myself. One of the reasons I do Page Three is that I could use it to raise money for breast cancer. It never crossed my mind that I would be refused.” The notion of posing topless for a national newspaper continues to illicit wildly contrasting opinions, with approval from salivating teenagers to staunch spurning from feminists. Tully unsurprisingly finds the concept of glamour modeling unrelated to impressions of anti-feminism.
“I don’t think glamour modeling is something that in any way puts anyone down. There are feminist issues that I would believe in. The simple fact that I posed topless in a newspaper doesn’t mean that I’m anti-feminist in any way. I believe that a lot of the anti-woman attitude and a lot of the negativity towards female sexuality has stemmed from the Catholic Church. I’m very adamant about that.” Ultimately, the glamour model industry is a cruel and impersonal world. Every girl in front of the lenses and lights has a shelf life, and eventually a time will come for Claire Tully to find alternative employment. “I’m not going to be able to do Page Three forever. Most girls finish up about 28-29. At that stage your career would progress into something else or it finished. At some stage there will come a time when I’ll have to put my bra back on and get back in the lab. I will go back into science work eventually, that’s what I’m interested in.”