Government badly needs to change its tune and inspire some optimism
Ryan Nolan is clearly a good singer and a good-looking lad, and he really poured his heart into his performance. The song sounded vaguely familiar, as if it was derived from something else, but then, so did most of the songs on the night (Apart, that is, from the utterly weird Romanian performance).
So maybe it didn’t deserve to win — but last? Twitter, of course, was going mad, mostly blaming Europe and expressing the view that everyone must hate us because our banks melted down and destroyed the European economy. Even if that were true, which of course it isn’t (mostly, anyway), I found it hard to imagine that the people who were voting for a Eurovision winner would have been motivated by geo-political considerations of that sort, or any sort indeed. The problem was the baby oil. We may find it hard to win a Eurovision song contest ever again, because with the influence of texting on the voting system you really have to have neighbours. We’re short of immediate neighbours, but we do have friends, lots of them. Irish music of all kinds is hugely popular all over the world, and something recognisably Irish always attracts a following.
