With seven wins under our belt, maybe we’ve got all our Eurovision glory and should just wait it out for a while

The dizzying excitement and more than sufficient knowledge I have about Eurovision when the competition takes place every year makes some people I know look like they only paid for half a botox treatment, with one Eyebrow permanently frozen in a raised position.

Ireland’s Brooke Scullion was really robbed last night when her song this is rich didn’t make it through the semifinals despite the performance of her life, combining her banging pop tune with a staging that would make Britney cry herself.

When she threw in a refrain of “Olé, olé, olé, olé” at the end of her performance and gave her home fans a big wink after whipping the Turin audience into a frenzy, the icing on the cake was the icing on the cake.

The hashtag #robbed rightly trended on Irish social media after the votes came in.

Comedian Oliver Callan, as if to continue the football metaphor, joked: “I’m seething with anger! Poor Brooke! Who handled the votes?! Thierry Henry?”

Fellow comedian Alison Spittle offered fans a real way out of their misery, suggesting an alternate finale for all the outlandish acts. I would watch it.

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As well as performance, the song itself benefited from a) a catchy name, b) a verse and chorus that were really distinguishable, and c) a driving beat and distinctive vocals that wouldn’t look out of place on Spin FM.

Brooke Scullion, from Bellaghy, Co Derry, is a born pop star who oozes charisma and will soon be working again with her mentor, Meghan Trainor Everything about this bass Fame.

She got knocked down, got back up and tweeted shortly after the bad news broke: “Very proud of this experience, thanks to my wonderful team. I will never forget Eurovision. On to the next…”

So, if the song was great, the performance was gorgeous, and 23-year-old Brooke is a star in the making, why didn’t it all work out? Why didn’t Brooke at least have a chance to make the final and have a chance of contributing to Ireland’s seven titles?

The voting system for the Eurovision Song Contest makes 1960s Northern Ireland look like the UN model.

In each of the two semi-finals, with 10 out of 17 acts progressing to the final, 50 percent of the votes will be texted by the audience and 50 percent will be decided by a panel of music industry professionals. The same goes for the final, but five founding countries – France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK – advance automatically.

Since the semi-finals were introduced in 2004, Ireland have failed to reach the final nine times. Our last final was in 2018 and our last top ten finish was Jedward in 2011.

The industry pros are involved because, you know… Lordi. And I’m sorry Norway (Give that wolf a banana), but nobody needs that now.

In addition, the public vote is notoriously partisan. Sweden always votes for Norway, Slovenia votes for Serbia, nobody votes for the UK (they got zero votes last year) and so on.

To be fair, this organized mess managed to give us an amazing winner in Italy last year. I still don’t know what the song was called or what the band Maneskin said, but I know I liked it and hundreds of millions of other people did too.

So how can Ireland return to the glory days of Eurovision victory?

That’s the wrong question. Should winning Eurovision even be something we aspire to, or waste time complaining about it?

With seven wins under our belt, maybe we all have our Eurovision wins and should just sit it out for a while.

The last thing we need is a court of inquiry into certain Eurovision-related matters, chaired by a former Supreme Court Justice, to deal with the kind of public outcry that only emerges in Ireland when the People who have to wait a while at the airport or who have been told to wait a while should drive their cars less.

Irish musicians should just keep writing great songs and delivering excellence on their own terms and care no less about reaching the Kyiv finals next year.

The most important thing now is that Ukraine emerge victorious.

Folk-rap act Kalush Orchestra’s song Stefania is objectively terrible, but unfortunately for the music, even more so this year than usual, that’s not the point.

Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian state broadcaster has invested heavily in Eurovision with the goal of winning the competition, which would mean hosting it and offering a propaganda and prestige bonus to the despotic regime.

However, Russia was eliminated from this year’s competition. They should have stayed in so that criminally misled Russian viewers – who are currently only exposed to heavily censored state-approved media – could see through a series of zero-point after zero-point in each country’s votes what the rest of the world is thinking of Putin’s murderous campaign in Ukraine.

So roll on Saturday. There won’t be any Irish finalists to cheer for, but I’ll be yelling at the TV so loud the neighbors will probably call the guards.