Séamas O'Reilly: Asking the hard questions about Ireland's Eurovision decline

Ireland's Eurovision hopefuls Wild Youth pictured at the M&S Bank Arena before heading into their final day of rehearsals at Eurovision before taking part in Semi-final 1 last Tuesday.

One thing Eurovision has taught us is that Irish people know how to lose with dignity, which I guess is something that comes with practice.

Next year it will be 30 years since we last won the competition, for which we still hold the record for most wins. If Sweden wins it this weekend, even that crown will be lost, as our Scandinavian friends will finally draw level with seven.

Explaining this to my childhood self would be unthinkable. Back then, I watched Eurovision without the irony which has fortified my enjoyment with age. Tactical or political voting was a foreign concept, as was the idea of musical subjectivity. I instead believed it to be, quite simply, a solemn, often tense, occasion in which the 50 best songs in Europe were officially arranged in order of objective quality. This sincerity was rewarded. 

My first 10 years alive saw us win five titles in that time alone, back when we were the unassailable masters of the maudlin euro hit, usually eschewing the up-tempo dynamics of our continental cousins, in favour of songs that were sad and vague and strange.

I have particularly strong memories of Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan’s 1994 winner, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Kids’, a song which put forward the unlikely argument that the best way to signal your love of rock music is by writing a soft piano ballad. 

Similarly inscrutable was Eimear Quinn’s ‘The Voice’, the last of our efforts to claim victory, whose lyrics were seemingly written from the point of view of an unnamed Celtic goddess, nebulously describing her terrifying ubiquity in all human lives. And Europe lapped it up. 

They concurred that it was nice, and slightly sad, that we once loved rock ‘n’ roll but couldn’t quite remember it well enough to replicate it musically. 

They agreed that an unspecified Irish deity could — in fact must — be given credit for the fullness of European harvests and the curing of all illness. Drunk with power, we imagined this would last forever. And though we birthed Riverdance into the world in this period as an afterthought, we would never know such victories again.

QUESTIONS OF OUR FAILURES

The last three decades have seen occasional flourishes of relevance, but quite a bit more pain. I do not come here to ask thorny questions of our failures, still less to demand a Dáil inquiry into our very own 30 years of hurt. Instead, I will take this opportunity to salute one of Eurovision’s more unheralded strengths — its presence as one of the finest platforms of good losing on Earth.

For me, the greatest aspect of the entire event has always been the absurdly long period of judging which must have few equals in the world of entertainment.

For every entry but the winner, this is little more than a comically extended, hours-long conveyor belt trundling toward eventual failure, in which we watch dozens of competitors suffer the most excruciatingly protracted loss imaginable. This they do, while laughing and cheering, to an audience of hundreds of millions of people, displaying a grace that borders on the superhuman.

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

The legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi once said “show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser” and, as I write those words, I’ll admit some part of me would like to see our contenders lash out publicly, to throw over their tables and kick up enough fuss that they get removed from the event.

Increasingly, however, Eurovision’s house style of smiling acceptance seems refreshing, even life-affirming. The past decade has seen a surge in wilful aversion to taking one’s losses. The current frontrunner for the US presidency long ago worked out that he never had to admit, concede or acknowledge any failing or defeat, whether a lost election, or being found liable for a sexual assault that would, surely, rule any normal person from continuing to pursue the most powerful political position on Earth.

Britain’s previous two prime ministers, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, recently parlayed their historically disastrous terminations into eye-wateringly lucrative writing and speaking careers, entirely predicated on the premise that they won, actually, and would have won harder if it hadn’t been for all the people saying they’d lost in the first place.

A CRASH-COURSE IN LIP SERVICE

There has, in short, been a complete collapse in the economy of failure acceptance. We thought, for a long time, that there existed certain rules of logic and accountability, however flexible they may have been, and however frequently they were bent to the will of those in power. 

We have spent the past decade learning, in real-time, that there are not. 

You lost an election? Simply say you did not. Tank the UK economy and cost the economy £30bn? Plaster on a smile and say we must have all imagined it. 

We’ve gotten a crash course in the fact that so many of our ostensibly meaningful checks and balances are just lip service, about as airtight as one of those honesty boxes you find dispensing vegetables in small villages. All predicated on the idea that powerful people will accept defeat, out of what exactly — shame?

The trouble with shame is it only works as a motivator when people are themselves motivated to avoid it. And this has led, inexorably, to shamelessness becoming a superpower in and of itself.

So, each time I see a Eurovision hopeful turning into a Eurovision hopeless, accepting it, dusting themselves off, and moving on, part of me rejoices that some scintilla of decorum has prevailed. That taking an L still has currency in a time when it has never been more devalued.

If there’s some shame in losing, there’s more in refusing to accept a losing hand. We go again. Perhaps next time we can enter a rock song about how much we used to love piano ballads. It couldn’t hurt.

We lost, again. But the good thing about that is you end up with much less to lose.