Eurovision Song Contest 2023

Your right of course but never underestimate the stupidity of other

Watching the fan village being dismantled on the BBC News Channel right now.

Can’t they keep the stage there as a permanent reminder?

:(

Spot on. If we want to be serious about competing at Eurovision again it needs to be removed from RTE. I saw a program on BBC yesterday and they were looking at how other countries pick their song, and saw Sweden. Their contest is a national vote that whittles the hopefuls down to a set few, and they then sing in arena with over 20,000 fans watching live and the the entire country votes for their entry. We need to put in a serious set of entries over the next few years to show Europe we want it.

Its not just about the song itself, its the right people for the song, the performance, the set design, the clothing, the lighting. Every minute detail needs to be looked and planned properly. We do none of that, we get a few acts to perform on the late late, and vote on what we think

Look at how some of the acts last night used the stage, the lighting, props etc. We had a guy in a gold jumpsuit walk down some stairs. While our song was never a contender, it was catchy enough to get out to that semi-final. How Croatia and Serbia came out of it and we didn't says everything.

We need to go balls out on either a seriously catchy "ear worm" type song, a big ballad or a stonking rock performance. But ffs look at everything to do with what we are putting on show, and we shouldn't be afraid to throw in the odd bit of irish music culture into from now and again, but done right. Other countries are not afraid to so why should we.

I thought Australia were short changed by with the voting. Their song was better than the votes it got, never a winner, but catchy enough.

And yea, it was Finland for me, and the crowd knew it too. Weird and catchy.

Croatia qualified over us due to the nature of their entry - basically F**k Off Putin. We wouldn't have the balls for the likes of that.

Last night’s greatest moment… :D

Absolutely !!

True, that it was and yea ours had no performance level at all

I wonder how many are ripping at the jury votes as there song lost, were complaining at the public votes last year as it was all just a solidarity vote

Please go away with this stupid conspiracy stuff

When there was exclusively a fan vote, people blame block voting. When the jury vote is added, people now say that the jury did all they could to give Sweden the win

Eurovision can’t win in that sense

The bizarre showing of which countries won the most gave me the impression that they were saying that Sweden would match Ireland's record of 7 wins, Sweden running away with the jury vote so much so that it made is very difficult for her to be beaten and then the host saying when she won that next year is ABBA's 50th anniversary which coincides with Sweden hosting. To me that sounds like the narrative from before the contest even started was Sweden was going to win and I think the huge difference between the jury votes and the public makes it look like the juries may have been influenced in some way to ensure Sweden's win especially in the face of what turned out to be a huge public vote for Finland.

I see the BBC are getting a lot of kudos for the production but I thought the sound quality was poor for a lot of the tracks including the UK.

My opinion is Yes. It is of nation pride. Not everything needs a payback.

Are they still pretending this is a song contest? It's been a sexuality contest for years now!

Juries or no juries, public vote or no public vote, there is never going to be a system that will be 100% fair, free from political voting or free from outside influences. The only option would be making it completely anonymous in the sense that we don't know which song is from which country until after the voting is completed. Even that probably wouldn't work very well as I am sure it will be leaked ahead of time what song belongs to which country. We had these discussions years ago and the EBU said they would publish the names of all the jurors before the contest to make it as transparent as possible which didn't seem to happen. So I think the juries should be scrapped.

As regards Ireland and the eurovision there is a danger that we go from one extreme to the other. On the one hand we took it for granted for too long and assumed that any old act would do because we were eurovision royalty, then we sent acts that we thought that the eurovision people would go for simply because they mimicked previous successful acts, in between we also sent trad acts and previous winners like niamh kavanagh, none of these worked.

However now it seems we could be going the other way and taking it way too seriously, going all in with stage performance and everything and still falling short because it will be too earnest and serious. I think there is no point in taking this competition too seriously because anything wacky and out there can be successful in it. I think just opening it up again to a proper song contest again and letting the public vote decide who goes forward should be way to go. We don't know what acts were whittled down by RTE before they came to their 6 finalists for the LLS, thats the factor that needs to go. Don't let RTE be the arbiters of what our entries are as they have got it so wrong for so long.

At the same time don't expect too much either , remember other countries have also not been successful in getting their entries to the final either ,last night both POland and Austria only reached the final for the first time in 5 years. We cannot be expecting too much from this. We just need to go with the flow and stop being overly concerned with having to do well every year