There’s knowing you are good and then there’s showing off. Ireland has won the Eurovision Song Contest so many times that this year it is considering putting forward a turkey as its official entrant.

This is no ordinary fowl in a competition renowned for its turkeys, but Dustin the Turkey, a celebrity TV puppet that has sold hundreds of thousands of albums in Ireland and whose name is as common on Irish general election forms as that of Jedi Knights on the census.

Dustin, who will sing Irlande Douze Points in a thick, North Dublin accent, is a clear favourite on a shortlist of six musical acts that will be chosen by a public telephone vote on February 23.

Although Dustin, who claims that by day he is a builder, will delight hordes of fans if he goes on to become Ireland’s eighth Eurovision winner, some of the nation’s higher-minded musicians have suffered a sense of humour failure over his candidature. Frank McNamara, who wrote two Eurovision winners, asked whether RTE, the state broadcaster that selected the six acts, was “giving two fingers” to Irish songwriters. “I think it is absolutely disgraceful,” he said.

Shay Healy, who wrote Johnny Logan’s Eurovision hit What’s Another Year?, wondered “how any bunch of grown-ups could come up with this as a solution”. And Phil Coulter thought that Eurovision was going “down the tubes”.

All three agreed that, as the final choice was the public’s, Dustin would very likely be going to Serbia for the competition.

In the 1990s Ireland won Eurovision four times, including three consecutive victories. The repeated cost of staging the international event led to claims that “turkeys” were eventually chosen deliberately to guarantee failure.

In 1994 it was an interval entertainment called Riverdance that many felt should have won first prize. The fast- action Irish music-and-dance routine went on to blaze a commercial trail around the world, its familiar rhythms becoming an unofficial market brand of the new “Celtic Tiger”.

After more than a decade of annual average growth of 7.2 per cent and the creation of more than 30,000 euro-millionaires in a population of four million, the glory days have come to an end and Dustin the Turkey seems to have captured the Zeitgeist.

As Dustin told a newspaper: “There is a direct link between the recent downturn in the economy and our poor showing in the Eurovision in the last number of years.”

Irlande Douze Points is being kept under wraps for now, but Dustin did reveal that Sir Terry Wogan, Bono and an apology for Riverdance all feature in the lyrics. The puppet, who rose to fame through a children’s TV show called The Den, has recorded a string of hit records, including Dustin Unplucked, Faith of Our Feathers, Poultry in Motion and Bling When You’re Minging. He had a Christmas No 1 in Ireland on which Bob Geldof sang backing vocals and was teased by the turkey. Dustin also sang Patricia the Stripper with Chris de Burgh.

In the 1997 presidential election thousands of voters spoilt their votes by entering “Dustin the Turkey” on their ballot papers, after which he established his own political party, Fianna Fowl.

Dustin told a Dublin newspaper yesterday that he was would be “extending the wing of friendship” to his detractors. “I am doing this for Ireland,” he said.

Those glory years

— Irishman Johnny Logan is the only person to have won the contest twice as a singer — in 1980 and 1987

— Four of Ireland’s seven Eurovision wins took place during the 1990s

— Ireland is the only country to have hosted three contests in succession, from 1993-95

— Overall, the country to which Ireland has given the most points is Britain

— The country to which Britain has given most points is . . . Ireland

Source: Times Archive

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