I’m as proud of the lads as anyone, abd I believe we should have done better than we did, but I don’t see a second year of Jedward being enough to bring home a win. Our entire eurovision strategy needs to be rethought to try and garner support from all the ‘new’ countries.

People don’t get it. Ireland will never win eurovision again. Despite all the hype, Jedward only just scraped through the semi in 8th. I made a packet betting against them. 50% jury votes will usually help us but probably worked against us for an act like Jedward. The real story can be seen in Lithuanias results. Most countries gave them zero but look at the countries that gave them points. Georgia and Poland gave them 12 points. Why? Culturally similar or expat voting? Then you see Ireland gave them 10 points and we have nothing in common. The whole tournament is just a game of who has the largest spread of sad expats voting for their own county regardless of quality. Unfortunately for us all our expats are in the one European country.

It’s unlikely that we will win Eurovision again anytime soon but it’s quite clear in the aftermath of this year’s results Jedward deserved a much higher finishing position than 8th. If they can come up with another song as good and as catchy as ‘Lipstick’ then they should go for it.

They injected a bit of life into this year’s competition and while they’ll always have their “haters”, they did an incredible job in not only performing but representing Ireland during the entire week. Would love to see them in Azerbaijan next year and hopefully they can bring home the prize.