Mary Byrne: I never saw anybody being treated badly on the X Factor

Jedward have slammed the X Factor in a savage Twitter tirade, but Mary Byrne says that some contestants on the show end up bitter when their career does not go the way they intended

Mary Byrne says the X Factor changed her life for the better.

In 2010 Mary Byrne blew the X Factor judges out of the water at her audition singing I Who Have Nothing by Tom Jones. Byrne came fifth in her season of the show, going on to have a number one album with Sony, record an album for Universal with Phil Coulter and then release an album independently. 

The show, she says, changed her life for the better. "I would not have been able to make the music I have made or meet the people I have met unless Simon Cowell and the company had given me the chance to do an album. That's not a losing situation, that's a winning situation."

The show and organisation of the X Factor is extremely clear from the outset, says the singer. "I know that lots of the kids were exhausted and they say that they signed contracts that they didn't know they were signing. You sign a contract and they say to you 'it'll be for the time you're on the X Factor and if we decide to do an album with you, we'll do it. If you do the album, and it works out, we may or may not do another album with you.' You're told that before you go anywhere."

Byrne says that she thinks that lots of contestants are disappointed when they don't make it outside the confines of the show. "In my opinion, I think some people get cross when they are not kept on. I don't know what young people want today. For me, the success I got is what I think I wanted more than anything. I knew I wasn't going to be a big pop star - I was a fifty-year-old woman."

The problem, she says, is expectation versus reality. "I think the younger kids go in there with a head full of dreams and when the dreams don't match up to their expectations and then some of them just walk away and some of them can't take being let go. I'm not saying that's what's happening here [with Jedward] but some of the kids I know do think like that."

The singer says that often, people go onto shows like the X Factor not realising that the cogs turning the wheels are a business, and that's a big mistake. "This business is hard work. People don't realise how hard it is to stay on that side of the business. 

Louis Walsh once said to me 'if you work your fingers to the bone for something you love it will come true for you. If you expect it all to fall in your lap, then you're in the wrong business.'

"I've seen a few people who are very bitter because they weren't treated the way they wanted to be treated, they were treated the way the business works and that's just the way it is - it is a business."

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