Before flying to Dublin to compete in the Late Late Show Eurosong Special in February, the Norwegian singer Emmy Kristiansen had never set foot in Ireland. To make up for lost time she embarked on a speed run of Irish culture: eating Tayto, sampling (alcohol-free) stout and tackling a full Irish breakfast – which introduced her to the alarming concept of black pudding.
The homework, if hurried, paid off: in a competitive and at times contentious contest, Laika Party, Emmy’s bittersweet disco ditty, finished in first place and will so represent Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest in Switzerland next week.
“We tried to be there the whole week to experience Ireland before Eurosong,” Emmy says from her home in Norway. “I loved it so much. I think Dublin and the whole of Ireland is so, so beautiful.”
Emmy’s smile does not waver once during her conversation with The Irish Times – not even when the subject turns to the fraught matter of Israel’s attendance at this year’s competition, in Basle, where it will be represented by a survivor of the Hamas-led attacks of October 7th, 2023, in which almost 1,200 people were killed.
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Controversy about Israel’s presence at Eurovision was an open wound at the 2024 contest, whose organisers instructed Bambie Thug, Ireland’s representative, to remove a pro-Palestine message from their costume during a dress rehearsal.
The national broadcasters of Iceland, Spain and Slovenia have questioned whether Israel should take part this year, and RTÉ’s director general, Kevin Bakhurst, this week asked the European Broadcasting Union, which organises the competition, for a discussion on Israel’s participation.
Asked about Israeli involvement at Eurovision, Emmy tries to strike a positive note.
“My biggest task as an artist and songwriter is to spread as much comfort and happiness as I possibly can, especially in hard times. Music is important,” she says.
Bambie Thug accused Israel’s national broadcaster, Kan, of “inciting violence” against them. The Irish entrant was also the subject of an open letter from 400 Irish artists asking that they boycott the event in protest at the policies of the Israeli government.
Given that the controversy has not disappeared, is Emmy apprehensive? “The EBU” – the European Broadcasting Union – “they had that experience last year,” she says. “Maybe they have set up something this year to make everyone feel safer.”
The EBU has indeed taken steps to enhance artist safety. These include a prohibition on filming individuals without their permission – something the Israel delegation was accused of last year.
Organisers have also scrapped the mandatory press conferences after the semi-finals, presumably in response to tensions in 2024 between Israel’s Eden Golan and the Netherlands’ Joost Klein. (Klein was subsequently expelled because of an unrelated incident; he was later cleared of any wrongdoing.)
Rules around flags have been amended, too; the audience will be allowed to wave Palestine flags, but official Eurovision delegations will be allowed to display only their national flags (effectively also banning them from using rainbow Pride or European Union banners).
“Israel’s participation will still be controversial for many viewers,” says Louise Holst, one of the hosts of the Éirevision podcast. “However, as the EBU’s position on the Israeli broadcaster’s participation has not changed, the hype around their participation may quieten down this year.
“The new safeguards to be brought in by the EBU, such as no-filming zones in backstage areas, calm zones, closed-door rehearsals, no compulsory press conferences and optimised rehearsal schedules, will hopefully make the political aspects of the contest less stressful for entrants.”
Backstage tensions aside, Eurovision 2024 was deemed a success for Ireland. Bambie Thug became the first Irish representative to qualify for the final since 2018. For a few heart-stopping moments the artist even seemed in with a shout of winning outright. In the end they placed a respectable sixth.
But rather than follow up Bambie Thug’s dark and stormy Doomsday Blue with something equally ominous, Ireland has tacked in the opposite direction with Laika Party, which packs three hooks into its first minute and surfs on endless waves of perkiness.
Its optimistic tone is impressive – all the more so given that its subject is the Soviet space dog Laika, who died gruesomely high above the stratosphere after being blasted into near-earth orbit in 1957.
Larissa Tormey, the track’s Westmeath-based cowriter, says: “The more hooks you have, the better it is for the song. And in this song we have three or four hooks. That’s the first important thing. The second important thing for Eurovision: the hook has to come up very soon – in the first 30 seconds. It’s such a big competition – if you don’t get your audience hooked in the first 30 seconds, you’re gone.”
Laika Party is full of fizz and, unlike some other entries, doesn’t make you hate the concept of music the way the UK’s atrocious What the Hell Just Happened?, by Remember Monday, might. But it isn’t a front-runner: bookies have it as a 66/1 outsider, a long way behind the favourites Sweden, Austria and France.
That said, it is expected to qualify from the second semi-final on Thursday despite the perceived disadvantage of Emmy featuring third in the running order – songs performed later in the night tend to do better.
“Laika Party is a fun, enjoyable electropop song,” says Holst, the podcaster. “As it stands, Ireland is viewed as a borderline qualifier in the Eurovision community. It has fallen between 10th- and 11th-most-likely to qualify in the top 10 of its semi-final. It is not considered in contention to win Eurovision this year, but it certainly has a chance to reach the final, with memorable staging and choreography.”
February’s Late Late Show Eurosong Special was controversial: Samantha Mumba, the runner-up, criticised the evening’s panellists, Bambie Thug, Arthur Gourounlian, Laura Fox and Donal Skehan, as “unnecessarily rude and vile”. How did Emmy find the process – and the feedback she received from the panel?
“I’m actually very scared of people’s opinions. I’m shy as a person,” she says. “During the show I tried not to listen to the panel, in case I would get hurt. I tried not to hear, just in case. We are humans. We have feelings. I totally get they are there. But I didn’t want to hear it.”
Emmy has created history as the first non-Irish artist to represent the country at Eurovision – though this is hardly new ground for the contest itself. Céline Dion, who is French-Canadian, won for Switzerland at the 1988 final, in Dublin, and Katrina and the Waves, fronted by the American singer Katrina Leskanich, won for the UK in 1997 (again in Ireland). But Tormey says the team knew it was a departure.
“When we submitted the song we put into the application form we were absolutely okay if RTÉ wanted to replace the singer and get in some singer from Ireland. Our main concern was to get the song into Eurovision, because we believed it would work. RTÉ said, ‘We don’t have any problem with Emmy. We have an Irish writer on the team, so it’s fine with us’.”
But if RTÉ is relaxed about a Norwegian being the face of Ireland at Eurovision, it has not been especially supportive of Laika Party: 2FM, its pop station, played the tune just seven times between its Eurosong win, on February 7th, and the end of March. Tormey points out that it has done well on streaming – the track has more than a million YouTube views – but says that she would, of course, have preferred more airplay.
“I am surprised. I actually thought it should have more exposure. I don’t listen to radio that much. Some people haven’t heard it. It should be pushed more in Ireland.
“At the same time, we need international exposure. Those are the people who are going to vote. Someone was texting me on Facebook about this, and I said, ‘Did you look at Spotify?’ Because I know on Spotify it has more than three million streams.
“And then Emmy has 1.2 million followers on TikTok. This song is very exposed on there. It does well enough. But I would like Irish media to support it a little bit more.”
Laika Party’s subject matter has proved divisive, too. The dog, catapulted into orbit as part of the Soviet space programme, suffered a horrific death. Emmy learned of her story during a family quiz night shortly before she participated in a Eurovision songwriting camp in Norway where she met Tormey and the other composer of the track. (Norway had first dibs on the tune but opted to pass.) The goal, she says, was to put a happy twist on a dark story.
“I thought her real story was so sad. I wanted to create a scenario where she gets to be happy and alive instead, having her own party in the sky. That’s why it became a party song. It’s for animal lovers out there: we want to imagine her happy and alive, instead of imagining the true story. She deserves a scenario where she gets to be happy instead.”
Not everyone shares Emmy’s point of view. “It’s so morbid I just can’t enjoy it,” one reviewer wrote on the influential Wiwibloggs Eurovision website. “The subject matter outright isn’t pleasant. Sure, this is another take on it where we imagine a happier outcome, but factually, no ... It’s a horrible story.”
Irish fans will hope such misgivings do not harm Emmy’s chances, as Basle could be a crossroads for Ireland in the competition. Two years ago Sweden equalled our record-setting seven victories when Loreen won for Tattoo.
With their 2025 entrant, Bara Bada Bastu, by KAJ – think Shrek fronting The Prodigy – among the favourites, there is every chance they will seize pole position outright. But why has Ireland, once a Eurovision champion, fallen away to the point where simply making the final would be regarded as an achievement?
“Eurovision is a totally different show to when Ireland was winning the contest in the 1990s. Songs and scoreboards have remained, but the way scores are calculated and presented have been reworked and developed over time,” says Holst.
“Staging, styling and the general visual aspect of performances have become more important since the beginning of the new millennium. This has been amped up with the addition of special effects and digital technologies in particular in the last 10 years. Use of LED screens, pyrotechnics and modern camerawork have propelled the contest into becoming a modern, innovative spectacle every May.”
The bigger the competition has become, the harder it has been for Ireland to make an impact, she says. “Increasing the number of participants has changed the contest, as diversity of music and cultures are showcased on the Eurovision stage rather than the western-/Nordic-heavy contest pre-2000.
“Social-media campaigns can affect the success of entries in the competition, as artists use TikTok, Instagram and other social networks to promote their songs and personalities to fans. Social media has also helped with the global brand of the contest, which the EBU has been heavily pushing with their inclusion of Australia in the last decade of the contest and allowing the Rest of the World to exist as a voting group.”
The other big factor has been the removal of the requirement for countries to sing in their national languages: in the 1990s, because of a rule introduced several years after Abba won for Sweden with Waterloo, in 1974, only Ireland, the UK and Malta could sing in English.
“The biggest advantage that Ireland has lost since the 1990s is being able to sing in English when most other countries could not: until 1999 entries had to be performed in national languages, but since then other countries have mostly chosen to sing in English,” says the Eurovision expert Dean Vuletic.
But he suggests that Ireland’s decline at Eurovision has had more to do with the country itself than with changes in the contest.
“Ireland won Eurovision four times in the 1990s, just before the Celtic Tiger economic boom took off. Its Eurovision success was important for nation branding before the boom, but economic success then became more desirable for the country’s international image ...
“Winning Eurovision became uninteresting for the Irish public – and had even proven to be a strain on RTÉ’s budget in the 1990s. It was kind of a Eurovision fatigue.”
Vuletic points out that Ireland is not the only former Eurovision power that now struggles.
“Ireland’s wins in the 1990s made it untouchable as the record holder for the most Eurovision wins, at seven, with the closest countries having five. But the countries with five wins – France, Luxembourg and the UK – have also not been so successful in Eurovision since the 1990s.
“The country that can now match the Irish record is Sweden, which has won four times since 1999. The point I want to make with this is that, in the history of Eurovision, there have been various phases in which some countries have been dominant.
“So if Ireland had its Eurovision golden age in the 1990s, for France it was in the first decade of the contest, and for Sweden it has been since 2012. Eurovision would hardly be exciting if only one country was always the most successful.”
There is an interesting wrinkle in Ireland’s latest Eurovision adventure. In the unlikely event that Emmy wins, she would have the added satisfaction of putting one over her near neighbours. How fitting it would be for a Norwegian to save us from Swedish dominance.
“I would love to do that for you, even though that’s a very tricky challenge,” she says, laughing. “I would, of course, love to do that for you – definitely.”
Emmy competes in the second Eurovision semi-final, on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player, on Thursday, May 15th; the other semi-final is on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player on Tuesday, May 13th. The final is on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Saturday, May 17th
