The way that Ireland has chosen its artist for the Eurovision Song Contest has seen several different formats.
They have had special shows from other cities around the country, had a series of programmes to encourage new talent, and more recently used their regular Friday evening programme, the Late Late Show, in their Dublin studios.
In an interview published by Meghann Scully on the website goss.ie, she writes about Johnny talking on the Ray Darcy RTE radio programme. Johnny explained his thoughts on the current selection format and expresses his view that he wants changes to the status quo. He is not in favour of the chat show being used any more.
I have to say I still think, no disrespect to Ryan [the host] – I enjoy the Late Late, but I think it’s the wrong place to do it. I think it’s when they changed it from the selection for the song of the country to the euro star and turned it into a popstars. They used to end up with two singers at the end of it and no song and that would be the cart going in front of the horse.
There has been much discussion on the selection of Molly Sterling as the artist with the song Playing with numbers. Johnny is very much in favour of her being this year’s entry.
He continues:
I think we are going back to what we used to do which is great. We have a beautiful young lady singing a song.
I’m not sure it’s the winning song but it’s a really nice song and I hope she does great because I’d love to see us going back doing this kind of think more often. We shouldn’t be competing with other countries on their level, we should have them compete with us on our level. In other words we shouldn’t be trying to set fire to the stage and dance around, jumping around through hoops.
What we should be doing is singing songs and that’s what we were always good at.
