Despite having been a failed candidate in 2003 and being temporarily eliminated in an earlier round of this year's contest, Chris Doran proved to be a true survivor in a contest of hard knocks by winning the final You're A Star vote. Joe Humphreys reports.
The 24-year-old Waterford man was announced as Ireland's representative in the Eurovision Song Contest last night.
Thanking his mother, who entered him in the competition, he said: "She supported me 110 per cent and I'm only here because of her," he said.
Almost 1 million votes were cast following Saturday night's performance of the two final entries with the results announced during a live show from the Helix in Dublin last night. Doran and his song, If the World Stopped Turning, which is co-produced by Westlife star Bryan McFadden, is now being priced at 8/1 to win the big one in Turkey on May 15th.
Doran, who was reinstated in the competition as judge Louis Walsh's "wild card" entry, is a survivor in more ways then one.
As an infant, his father, Myles, who came from a Traveller family which settled in Waterford city, died in a road traffic accident. When aged 13 years Chris was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and underwent bouts of chemotherapy.
Last night he described his mother as "a Dad figure and a Mum figure", and she in turn paid tribute to the dedicated performer who used to cycle "up and down the hills of Waterford" to get to music lessons.
The win was overshadowed by talk of favouritism over the production of the winning entry. While Doran was able to avail of commercial studios previously used by Westlife, the runner-up, James Kilbane, had to record his entry "in house" at RTÉ.
At a press conference afterwards, attended by among others the Minister for Communications, Mr Ahern, McFadden said no rules were broken by recording the song outside RTÉ.
The station's commissioning editor Kevin Linehan was also keen to play down any talk of a fix, stressing that McFadden's song was allocated to Doran through a committee-based selection process. "Louis Walsh is not involved," he said.
Kilbane, the biggest thing to come out of Achill Island since the bridge to the mainland in 1886, was philosophical in defeat, expressing thanks to all those who voted for him in the earlier rounds. His song Losing You is to be released as a single, along with the winning entry, in the coming days.