Irish viewing figures still strong

by Richard West-Soley 60 views

Despite Ireland's first ever last place at a Eurovision Song Contest final last Saturday, plenty of Irish television viewers were at hand to commiserate and curse from the armchair, as viewing figures remained strong with a slight increase on 2006.

Saturday's final in Helsinki was watched by over 780,000 Irish viewers, which is marginally higher than last year's figures. This corresponds to an impressive 53% of the viewership in Ireland, which means that over half of the available audience had tuned in to support Dervish. The total compares very favourably with several other Western European countries' figures, notably France, Denmark and Norway.

Vote hijacking?
However, reactions are unsettled with talk of a "hijacking" of the Irish televote by the country's immigrant population doing the rounds in the Irish press currently. Lithuania received a whopping douze points from Ireland, picking up little from elsewhere. William Kenny, of bookmaker William Hill, summed up the current mood by suggesting "these days, you have to be either mad as a hatter or Eastern European".

As Ireland faces the semifinal in 2008, it remains to be seen whether the Eurovision magic holds fast for the irish.

Richard West-Soley

Senior Editor

Richard's ESC history began way back in 1992, when he discovered the contest could fuel his passion for music and languages. Since then, it's been there at every corner for him in some way or another. He joined the esctoday.com team back in 2006, and quickly developed a love for writing about the contest. In his other life, he heads the development team at the learning resources company Linguascope, and writes about all aspects of language learning on the site Polyglossic.com.