An Irishman's Diary

WHILE Ireland’s back-to-basics approach to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest is probably to be welcomed, I fear that victory in the competition may already have eluded us again.

Even as the nation opted for a standard boy-meets-girl/girl-falls-in-love/boy-behaves-like-jerk/everything-ends-in-tears type pop-song at the weekend, the signs were that (two years late for my colleague John Waters) the 2009 contest is going political.

Most of the attention in Moscow, I predict, will be on the Georgian entry. Picking up where its army left off in the recent conflict between the countries, Georgia has now resorted to the ultimate weapon, 1970s-style disco, to launch a thinly veiled attack on the Russian prime minister entitled We Don't Want a Put In.

Sung in English, the song is not a lyrical masterpiece. It does manage to rhyme “Put in” with “Shoot in”, but that seems to be the high point. Otherwise, in textbook disco mode, it accuses Vladimir Putin of merely “Killin’ the groove” (with a “negative move”): which is something that – like disco itself, regrettably – is still not outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.

Even so, the song is the Eurovision equivalent of the Ems Telegram. At the very least, it promises to add spice to the contests already notoriously political voting patterns. The Kremlin may be tempted to take notes of which countries award douze pointsto the Georgians, and to bring this up when the offenders' gas contracts come up for renegotiation.

He-man that he is, however, who knows how Mr Putin will react to the insult? It could make for the most tense situation in Moscow since Boris Yeltsin ordered the tanks to fire on parliament in 1993.

By contrast, the yet-to-be-chosen Israeli entry has caused controversy by presenting too rosy a picture of relations between Israel and its enemies. The winning song will be one of four written in equal-parts Hebrew, Arabic, and English. But the main problem is the performers: a Jewish singer and peace activist who goes under the name of Noa and her artistic collaborator, an Israeli Arab called Mira Awad.

The two have worked together for years. During the second Palestinian intifida, in a triumph of optimism over experience, they had a hit with a cover of the Beatles' We Can Work It Out. But in light of the recent conflict in Gaza, the latest version of Noa's Ark has been attacked by both Arabs and left-wing Israelis for glossing the reality.

Neither of these controversies compares with the Eurovision's political zenith in 1974: when Abba were winning with Waterloo, the Portuguese entry was a coded signal to pro-democracy rebels in Lisbon that a planned uprising against the military junta should begin. The song finished joint last, but the resultant (almost bloodless), coup ended 50 years of dictatorship in Portugal.

Even so, assuming they get past the semi-finals, my money will be on the Georgians this year. As for the Irish entry, unless it’s a coded call for the overthrow of the Government, I think we may have missed another trend.

CHANGING the subject, to music (complaints from Eurovision fans on a postcard, please), I regret to say that the career of the late Frank Zappa and his band, the Mothers of Invention, passed me by.

They were incredibly prolific, which was part of the problem: it was always hard to know where to start. And although I liked the album titles, especially Were Only in It for the Moneyand Shut Up and Play Your Guitar, Zappa's rock-jazz avant-gardism seemed a bit too far out there to follow. For me, the definitive detail about him was that he named two of his children, respectively, Moon Unit and Dweezil.

Only now, thanks to RTÉ's Book on One, which has just featured a biography of Zappa, do I learn that not even he escaped the embrace of Paddy Moloney and the Chieftains – which, God knows, has claimed so many other international performers down the years.

They became friends and music collaborators late in Zappa's life. And so taken was he with one Chieftains song in particular that when he died in 1993, they played Kevin Conneff's haunting version of Green Fields of Americaat his funeral.

This, incidentally, is a classic of the melancholic song genre that once, as G.K. Chesterton joked, defined this country; and that may now be due a comeback after the blip that was happiness and prosperity. But, dating as it does from the 19th century, it also reminds us that recessions are cyclical. Here's a typical verse: Ah and I mind the time when old Ireland was flourishing,/ And most of her tradesmen did work for good pay,/ Ah, but since our manufacturers have crossed the Atlantic/ It's now we must follow on to Amerikay.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, I know, that the Chieftains got to Frank Zappa too. In their global outreach mission, they have played with everyone from Mick Jagger to the Muppets, while collaborating with indigenous musical styles from Chile to China.

In terms of planting the Irish flag abroad, while defusing tensions and spreading goodwill, their success rate must compare favourably with the Department of Foreign Affairs.

In fact – never mind the Israeli Eurovision entry. If there’s any hope of agreement in the Middle East, we should dispatch Paddy Moloney as a special envoy now. He might or might not be able to negotiate lasting peace between Hamas and the Israeli military. But I bet he could get them to collaborate on a studio album while we were waiting.