HAVING a laugh at Eurosong is like bombing an orphanage: a cowardly exercise. All eight entrants in last night's easy listening fest at the Point Depot have doubtlessly toiled and travailed long and hard to come up with the hackneyed harmonies, maudlin melodies and Junior Certlevel lyrics that the event requires. This year was another underwhelming success.
There are troubling questions of national identity here: anybody who has roved around the Continental end of Europe will glumly testify to the fact that our citizenship of a modern, progressive republic is not characterised in terms of Joyce or Beckett but in terms of Johnny Logan.
Because we're always winning the confounded event, one would have thought (hoped?) that we would have been presented with the Eurosong contest award in perpetuity and allowed to watch on from the mediocre musical high ground as our less fortunate Euro brothers and sisters battled it out for the credibility poisoning chalice.
Not so, this year we suffer the indignity of having to go into a semi final play off in Geneva next month to see if we make the final cut of 23 countries which will assemble with their tourist board video packages in Oslo on May 18th. The creation of so many instant sovereign states over the last few years means that demand for entry into the Eurovision Song Contest has outstripped supply.
Battling it out in the play offs for us is The Voice, written by Brenadan Graham and sung (in a pitch perfect manner) by the Anuna singer Eimear Quinn, a 23 year old from Dublin. The musical cleansing of the Point Depot takes place on the 22nd and 23rd of this month when Oasis come to town.
