I voted for Song C in the Eurosong Contest on Friday night, Brian Kennedy's entry, Every Song is a Cry for Love. The other songs were moderately good, but Kennedy's was exceptional and he sang it superbly.
If you believe that what matters is the result, the outcome vindicates RTÉ's running of the competition. But what this misses is that RTÉ has a statutory responsibility for promoting artistic and creative values in this society.
In mid-November last, when RTÉ announced that Brian Kennedy would sing Ireland's entry in the Eurovision, it also launched an open national competition to find the best song. Three judges were named: Brendan Graham, Shay Healy and Paul Brady.
Over 1,000 songwriters, citizens and licence-fee payers took this seriously enough to go to the trouble of writing or perfecting one or two songs in the hope of representing their country in Athens. I was one of that 1,000-odd, submitting two songs co-written with a friend.
I hand-delivered our entries to RTÉ on Friday December 16th, the day before the closing date. On the RTÉ website, where the details and rules of the contest were posted, this closing date was emphasised several times.
This deadline, incidentally, gave people just over three weeks to prepare their entries. It was also stipulated that entrants would get a written acknowledgement "on receipt".
Not having received an acknowledgement after five weeks, I called RTÉ to make sure that our songs had been passed on to the judges.
I was told the deadline had been extended by six weeks, to January 27th, "to be fair to the late entries coming in". I was also told that this extension had been publicised, though it was the first I'd heard of it. I was even more taken aback to learn that most of the songs would not be heard by the judging panel, but eliminated in a preliminary process.
Rather naively, I pointed out that since the preliminary judging was to be undertaken by people who, presumably, were not songwriters, it was likely that entries would be judged on other than songwriting criteria, eg arrangements, production quality, etc. This gave an advantage to those who, having missed the deadline, now had an extra six weeks to produce a quality arrangement and demo. I formed the impression I was wasting my breath.
When it emerged that Brian Kennedy had a song in the final four, things began to make sense. Last week, Julian Vignoles of RTÉ confirmed that Kennedy was a late entrant, as, it seems, were the other shortlisted songs.
Mr Vignoles also stated that all the songs entered were listened to by "an initial jury" comprising Vignoles himself, the "music associate" of the Late Late Show, Alan Byrne, and Paul G Sheridan, a "Eurovision expert". Of the 1,000-plus songs entered, only 40 songs were heard by the official judging panel.
An RTÉ spokeperson last week said that it had never been suggested that the judges would listen to all the songs, but that a committee would prepare a shortlist for the judges. But here is what it said on the RTÉ website: "Four songs will be shortlisted from those submitted. A committee chaired by two-times Eurovision-winning songwriter and co-writer of You Raise Me Up, Brendan Graham, along with former Eurovision winner Shay Healy and prolific and popular singer songwriter Paul Brady, will select the final four". There was no mention of Julian Vignoles, The Late Late or Eurovision experts.
RTÉ has expressed exasperation at the expectation that three judges could listen to over 1,000 songs. But this is what was promised, and why should it be more difficult for three nominated judges than for Julian Vignoles and two others? It may well be the case that Kennedy's was the best of the songs, but we can never know this because the judges heard less than 4 per cent of the entries.
Inevitably, in the media discussions in which I participated last week, some callers demanded to know why we weren't talking about Iraq or the Stardust disaster. Such banality, of course, always masks a deeper agenda. But if this is to be our standard for public discussion, let us put an end to all talk about sport, art or entertainment, and spend our lives reflecting on horror and disease.
Even if this were indeed a trivial matter, it must surely prompt this question: if this is what happens with the little things, what are they up to in the big things? But it isn't trivial. It goes to the heart of how creativity is treated in this society, and speaks volumes about RTÉ's ability to carry out its public mandate. I've received dozens of communications from unhappy songwriters who are left with a sense that their creative efforts don't matter, that they have been treated contemptuously by the national broadcaster and that the result leaves no room for anyone but those who have already arrived.
Nothing, you might say, but the same old story.