Ireland’s own: from Cathal Dunne to Bambie Thug

Amazingly, seeing as Cork people are so great at everything from winning Oscars to sport to making pudding, this was only the second time someone from Cork represented Ireland at the Eurovision.

The first, and the last time, was in 1979, when Cathal Dunne represented us in Jerusalem. Most people didn’t give a huge amount of thought then to the fact that the Eurovision was being held in Jerusalem, which was in what was then known in Ireland as “The Holy Land”.

Though we were vaguely aware of what was known as “the Middle-East crisis” that year, due to the queues at petrol stations.

Cathal Dunne was very definitely not non-binary. Even the name of his song proclaimed it: Happy Man. There was no non-binary in Ireland back then, and if there was, it was well-hidden in the shadows, where we kept things like that.

In those simple days, all a man needed to be happy was love. The love, it was assumed, of a woman. Cathal began the song feeling life had no answers for him, no special meaning or plan. But then he finds love, and he’s in love and alive, a happy man. That was enough for us back then. “Sure aren’t I alive?” Weirdly, practically anyone who was alive back then could now sing you the chorus of Happy Man. They didn’t know they could, but suddenly, it has bubbled up from the collective unconscious.

As it happened, Cathal Dunne’s uncle was the taoiseach. Jack Lynch was a GAA hero who smoked a pipe. Both he and the pipe were generally regarded as harmless at the time. Pipes were regarded as a safe version of cigarettes. Like the vapes of their day.

Despite the fact that Jack Lynch and Cathal Dunne were related, there were virtually no conspiracy theories then about some kind of secretive elite running Ireland.

The irony is, it turned out there was a secretive elite running Ireland back then. They were priests, who were ahead of their time in being a real-life conspiracy theory, and in pioneering what we now know as cancel culture. And we couldn’t get enough of them. Women would even go on holidays to The Holy Land with them.

The Pope back then was ahead of his time too. He was the Taylor Swift of his day. He could pack them in and shift economies wherever he went, and his fans would attack anyone who said anything negative about him.

The support act on his 1979 Irish tour was Michael Cleary, who smoked fags, on the TV. And Eamonn Casey, who was partial to a cigar, which possibly should have set off alarm bells.

The next Cork taoiseach would sort out all that smoking business.

There was no racism back then. Angry marches in Ireland in 1979 were mainly to do with tax. We even welcomed a few hundred Vietnamese refugees, known as “boat people”.

That December Jack Lynch resigned and was replaced as taoiseach by one Charles Haughey — and some might say that was the beginning of the modern Ireland we know now: an Ireland where Bambie Thug could represent us all, with barely a denunciation from the pulpit. That we know of.