Ireland: RTÉ to evaluate Eurovision options for the future
Wild Youth represented Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest 2023. Unfortunately for the country that holds the record of most number of victories in the contest, they failed to qualify to the Grand Final once again. Ireland has not gone through the finals since 2018.
Head of Delegation Michael Kealy has shared his first throught about the negative results for Ireland. According to Mr. Kealy, it is important for Ireland to change its format to select their representative. In the most recent years Ireland has chosen their representative using The Late Late Show as their national selection:
“I think The Late Late has served it well in a way – it’s been the only vehicle of a sufficient scale that we can do, to be honest. It’s very limited, but it’s the best thing we can do in that studio.”
However, he also blames a lack of funding from the public broadcaster as one of the reasons for the bad results:
“I’m not going to win any popularity contests for saying this, but RTÉ has been chronically underfunded I think, in my opinion, for decades, and it shows particularly when it comes to us putting on entertainment shows (…) When it comes to entertainment, you need scale to make it look as impressive as a show that you would see in other European countries, and the truth is our facilities in RTÉ are not sufficient to mount shows like that.”
Although we are at an early stage for next year’s selection, Mr. Kealy stressed that RTÉ will discuss the future path of the country at Eurovision at their entertainment department and with the Late Late Show about the song selection approach for 2024.
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