Here's how many people tuned into Eurovision in Ireland on Saturday
Bambie Thug performing at Eurovision Song Contest. Picture: Andres Poveda
More than half a million people tuned into Saturday's Eurovision grand final, which saw Bambie Thug secure Ireland's first top-10 finish since 2011.
With 278 points, the Cork-born artist earned Ireland's highest placement since Eamonn Toal performed ‘Millennium of Love’ in 2000.
Now, RTÉ has revealed that this year's final was watched by an average of 666,000 viewers, representing 54% of the available audience.
Some 19,000 viewers watched on RTÉ One +1 while on the broadcaster's online player, there have been 221,000 streams to date, viewed from 124 countries.
The overall competition, which was marred with controversy over the participation of Israel, saw Switzerland's Nemo Mettler claim victory. They performed the operatic-pop song 'The Code', which had been seen as one of the favourites to win the competition and they topped the jury vote.
It comes as a pollster explained the discrepancy between Ireland’s jury vote and its public vote.
Ireland’s jury panel awarded a maximum 12 points to eventual winner Switzerland and 10 to Sweden, with no points going to Israel.
In the public vote, however, 12 points were awarded to Croatia and 10 were awarded to Israel, something which may have come as a surprise to some viewers given the widespread public and political outrage here towards Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
Israel's participation in this year’s competition caused significant controversy, with pro-Palestinian protests taking place in Malmö in the days leading up to the Eurovision.
Lecturer in Politics at TU Dublin and pollster with Ireland Thinks, Kevin Cunningham, said there are two main reasons why such voting discrepancies can occur.
“In the first case it's a problem of sort of diffuse alternatives,” he said.
“If Israel were on the ballot, and that was the principal thing people were voting on, there's only one Israeli option and 24 other non-Israel options. So that means that the relative concentration of support within the Israeli option tends to be a little bit on the higher end.”
Mr Cunningham said that, when public votes in the contest in previous years are tallied, the country in second place averaged around 13% or 14% of the vote, meaning quite a large proportion voted for other entries.
He said the other reason such discrepancies happen is motivated reasoning.
“We kind of see this in politics when it comes to turnout in elections, turnout in referendums. When we see turnout in referendums become very low, we notice that the results become quite skewed,” he said.
“When the turnout in the referendum gets lower than 35%, the people who are more motivated, more interested, tend to influence the outcome a little bit more.”
He told RTÉ Radio's that, in the case of Eurovision, this is “even more extreme because we know that even of those that view the Eurovision, only around 6% or 7%, from previous data, actually vote”.
This, he said, is further accentuated by the number of times a person can vote — up to 20.
“You could imagine there are certain people who vote once or twice for a given song, and then there might be some people who vote 20 times for the exact same song or country and, by definition, taken together with the low turnout and the scale in which people might be voting, it necessitates, basically, an extreme sort of preference for whoever tends to win or otherwise.”
“If you imagine a room of, like, 100 people and 99 of them vote once, one of them votes 20 times, based on our sums, you could expect that one to win,” he added.
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