Ireland’s Wild Youth was eliminated in the first semi final of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest back on Tuesday night, and the lead-singer took the disappointment to his social media, saying that “they never give Ireland a chance”. The last time Ireland qualified for the Grand Final was back in 2018, when Ryan O’Shaughnessy represented his country in Lisbon with “Together”.

Ryan has spoken about about Ireland’s bad run at the Eurovision Song Contest, and stated on his official Twitter account the following:

Irish Eurovision delegation needs mixing up, I think we should think about doing what UK did a few years back and outsource required jobs to music industry folks like myself. In 2018 when I qualified with the song “Together” I stepped in as creative director after refusing to emerge from an exploding cake and pushed hard to have 2 male dancers on stage with me, which was a hard sell at the time.

I was responsible for signing off on final production of the track itself, I hired an independent stylist, and made sure the project as a whole had some content to it and it wasn’t just a song, but a message. All these factors helped get Ireland into the final. In my opinion, we need to have Irish songwriting camps with the intention of getting a brilliant song. We also need to allocate a large part of the budget to international marketing and should have the song out at least 4 or 5 months in advance of the competition.

We have a language, a culture and a sound to offer the world, if we put forward a real Irish song it will resonate.. Just my thoughts, rant over.

The exploding cake was the idea of a creative director hired by RTE and not Michael Kealy himself, just to clarify.

Do you agree with Ryan? Let us know in the comment section below, and give a listen to his song “Together” right below: