Confirming rumours reported last month by esctoday.com, RTÉ has announced a new competition that will pick Ireland's entry to the next Eurovision Song Contest held in Belgrade, Serbia next May. Taking the continually changing nature of the contest itself together with this year's poor Irish result in Helsinki into account, RTÉ decided to take a new look at the strategy for selecting their entry. For that purpose RTÉ assembled a consulting committee with Song Contest winner Linda Martin and other interested parties from the music writing, music performance and dance arts to assist RTÉ in their review.

The key findings of the committee were that the Eurovision Song Contest has changed to incorporate bigger and bigger productions and that the growth in the number of Eastern European countries participating has made the contest even more competitive. They reached a decision with that in mind.

RTÉ will use a national selection format for both singer and song in 2008. The competition will be called Eurosong 2008. RTÉ is inviting entries that include the song, the singer(s) and any proposed performance or staging details. By this, RTE expects to simplify the procedure by having an artist agreed to perform the specific song written by the composer who also agrees to the submission of the entry. That is to say a 3 in 1 solution.

The closing time for entries will be noon Monday, the 21st of January 2008. Entries should be submitted to Fidelma Kelly, RTÉ Entertainment, Donnybrook, Dublin 4.

As in previous years,an assemblyfrom RTÉ, will create a shortlist from all the entries received. The shortlisted candidates will go to the final judging committee. This final judging committee will then select six entries to compete in Eurosong 2008, which will be broadcast as a television special by RTÉ in February.

The detailed rules for the Irish national selection Eurosong 2008 can be found here.