EUROVISION 1996 SHOULD have been Gina G’s year. Her syrupy club banger “Ooh Aah… Just A Little Bit” had a pestilential quality which endures in late-night dive bars to this day.
Striding onto the stage in Oslo wearing a short sequined dress and high heels, she sang and gyrated with the sexual confidence which defined the Britpop era.
Ireland’s entry went for an altogether different aesthetic. Draped in a virginal white gown and standing completely still, Eimear Quinn belted out folk ballad ‘The Voice’ in what felt like a banshee-toned rebuke to the British entry.
While Gina G was accompanied by crotch-thrusting ravers, Quinn had trad musicians dressed like extras in an Irish-American fever dream. It was two years since Riverdance stole the show at Eurovision 1994, and the world still had an appetite for this sort of thing. It was 12 points all around and Ireland won the contest for a record-setting 7th time.
I was seven and watched the show in my grandmother’s house in Roscommon. The country was still a largely undeveloped, provincial island on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, but I felt immense pride to be Irish. Irish culture was cool, and I knew it.
Our rock bands, novelists and filmmakers were some of the most acclaimed in the world. I loved the Eurovision because we were particularly class at it.
The television set was the medium through which all of this was communicated. It was how I learned about the world beyond the patchwork of rural towns I lived in, but it was also how I discovered what the world understood about us.
My Granddad in Roscommon had been a fruit importer – when he opened his business in the 1950s, many of his customers in the West of Ireland had never seen a banana before. He was the first man in town to own a TV, so neighbours would gather at the window to watch my mother and her siblings watch RTÉ.
Things had kicked on a bit by the time I watched Quinn bag the Eurovision, but the country was still a different planet from how it is today. We had a flair for the supernatural. When my mother packed us into the car for the long drive home to Kildare, my grandmother tearfully doused the windscreen in holy water, as if quenching some invisible flame.
What I couldn’t have understood at the time was that our artistic relevance during this period was underwritten, at least in part, by the perception that Ireland was a romantic, tragic place.
Set against the appalling backdrop of the Troubles, the sympathy felt for Ireland was perhaps not dissimilar to the wave of goodwill that carried Ukraine to its Eurovision win last year. With lyrics like “I am the voice of your history… Answer my call and I’ll set you free”, you could be forgiven for thinking that Quinn’s song had a political undertone. The IRA had bombed Canary Wharf only two months previously.
Eurovision ’96 was probably the peak of ‘Ireland’ being shorthand for ‘dangerous and interesting’.
By the time Richard Gere played a Republican sniper in the atrocious The Jackyl the following year, our reputation for being sexy and sad was starting to diminish. The Good Friday Agreement was signed shortly after and the world’s tastemakers moved on.
Our financial, political and entertainment elites were preparing for what would come next. When Boyzone had their breakthrough in 1996, the national brand was already being transitioned into something gooey and inoffensive.
The Republic became equally appealing to multi-national corporations looking for tax breaks as it did to tourists hoping to recreate PS I Love You. The country was sanitised and ready to be sold to the mass market.
From the ashes of the cultural boom rose its economic equivalent – a bleary-eyed boor, lurching along Baggot Street and calling himself the Celtic Tiger. International capital flowed in while we natives sold houses to one another in a passable impression of entrepreneurialism.
When the fiscal comedown came, the nation was so ill-at-ease with itself that it sent Dustin the Turkey to Eurovision 2008 as a kind of cultural suicide bomb. Not only had we stopped being interesting artistically, but now we’d started salting the earth.
In the ruins of what followed, a new generation of Irish creatives started from scratch. Unencumbered by the emotional baggage of the decades previous, they have been able to tell authentic Irish stories on their own terms.
Perhaps most remarkably, they’ve been commercially viable without laboured references to the North or bare-chested men mincing about in leather trousers. NME called Fontaines DC the best band in the world last year. Sharon Horgan, Aisling Bea and Lisa McGee are writing some of the best shows on television. Sally Rooney, meanwhile, is already one of the most influential novelists ever.
Whether Ireland achieves its 8th Eurovision win this year with Wild Youth’s offering or enjoys another noble failure, no one watching will associate us with the horrors of civil war, poverty, or Michael Flatley’s oiled, jiving torso. Let’s all take a moment to be grateful for that.
Peter Flanagan is an Irish comedian and writer. You can find him on Twitter @peterflanagan and Instagram @peterflanagancomedy.
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