Madam, - Postmortems are only required when the cause of death is suspicious which is why, with the best will in the world, none is necessary with regard to Ireland's 2007 Eurovision entry. Nor, as John Waters has generously reflected, is there any need to speculate on voting alliances which, if they operate, do to a very scattergun effect.
What is necessary to reflect on is the mechanism for selecting the Irish song. The last decade has seen the competition open up a vast eastern frontier that has brought new-found exuberance and joie de vivre to the competition. RTÉ, in the midst of this, has inexplicably begun to behave like the official culture department of an isolated and remote autocracy, choosing the singer in advance, limiting the number of possible songs to the bare minimum, and generally giving the impression that "national representation" was a terrible burden it has taken upon itself to bear with equanimity. It is quite simply bizarre.
From 1965 until Ireland's last victory in 1996, the National Song Contest was indisputably the continent's greatest engine of Eurovision successes. There was no great secret to its success beyond the fact that it opened its doors fairly to a range of Irish performers and songwriters who were astute and talented enough to deliver the goods more often than our competitors.
This letter is no paean to times past. If Ireland's future is to be an also-ran in the Eurovision Song Contest then so be it. What is frustrating is that, as the competition changes, RTÉ's response has been to refuse to allow talented Irish songwriters and performers to respond to those changes and provide Irish audiences with a real choice as to who represents us. The time has come to revisit the National Song Contest and let the farce that is Eurovision be a farce that we can all enjoy fairly and squarely. - Yours, etc,
DONAL NUGENT, Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1
Madam, - John Waters's search for cultural understanding clearly has a long way to go. Appreciating that the term "Eastern European" has, in the post-Berlin Wall collapse world, been deprecated in favour of "Central European" would be a start. - Yours, etc,
ULTAN Ó BROIN, South Circular Road, Dublin 8.
Madam, - I almost asphyxiated on my muesli this morning when your reviewer Karen Fricker described Saturday's most deserving Eurovision winner as being "stocky and mannish". Was Ms Fricker perhaps watching last year's show which if memory serves correctly was indeed won by large hirsute creatures of the XY chromosome variety ? - Yours, etc,
Dr MAURICE GUERET, Terenure, Dublin 6w.
Madam, - It is difficult to say which is least relevant to modern Ireland: John Waters's continuing interest in the Eurovision Song Contest, his perspective on the Prague Spring or his weekly columns. - Yours, etc,
Yours faithfully,
MICHAEL SMITH, Ormond Quay Upr, Dublin 7.