Eurovision 2025: When is it on, what are Ireland's chances and how does voting work?
It's Eurovision 2025 week! Where is the contest taking place?
The 69th edition of the
Eurovision Song Contest
is to be staged at the 12,000-capacity
St Jakobshalle
in Basle after Switzerland won the right to host with
last year's victory by Nemo with No Code
. There will be two semi-finals on Tuesday and Thursday at 8pm, with the grand final on Saturday at 8pm. The semi-finals will be broadcast on
RTÉ2
and the final on RTÉ One.
Who is representing Ireland at Eurovision 2025?
Ireland's Eurovision hopes have been entrusted to 24-year-old Norwegian singer
Emmy Kristiansen
, who will perform the song Laika Party – co-written with
Russian
-born,
Westmeath
-based Larissa Tormey.
Emmy is from a village in the south of
Norway
. In 2021, she reached Norway's Eurovision national finals with Witch Wood. In 2023, she was on the jury that selected Norway's representative in the competition. In Basle, she will be joined by her brother Erlend, who will maintain a deadpan pose while playing keyboards.
Tell me more about the song.
Emmy came up with the concept of Laika Party
at a songwriting camp in Norway
. A few days previously, she and her family had been having a quiz night, and one of the questions had to do with Laika, the space dog notoriously blasted into high orbit aboard Sputnik 2 by the Soviet Union in 1957, where she was left to a horrible fate, confused and alone – perhaps like Ireland's
Wild Youth
at
Eurovision 2023
?
READ MORE
It isn't the first time Laika has been eulogised in song – the tragic pooch is referenced in the
Arcade Fire
track
Neighbourhood 2 (Laika)
. 'It's a great story about a dog being the first living creature in space,' the band's singer,
Win Butler
, explained. 'Doing this spectacular thing, but not having food and watching itself fall back into the earth.'
So, do we like this song?
Laika Party has its fans – but it has also proved controversial, with some Eurovision commentators struck by the contrast between the upbeat synth melody and the downbeat subject. Emmy says that this is the point: the real Laika suffered a lonely death. In Laika Party, she set out to rewrite history and give the interstellar dog a happy ending. As she sings: 'I hope Laika never died and that she spins around us still/ And that she has a party in the air and always will.'
Why is a Norwegian singing about a dead Soviet space dog representing Ireland in Switzerland?
There is a rich history of singers representing other countries at Eurovision. Katrina Leskanich of Katrina and the Waves did so for the UK in 1997, while in 2021, rapper Flo Rida featured on the San Marino entry. If new to Ireland, it is a long-standing Eurovision tradition.
What about the staging?
Emmy rehearsing her song Laika Party in St Jakobshalle, Switzerland. Photograph: Corinne Cumming/EBU
At Eurovision, appearance counts as much as the song – one reason Macroom's
Bambie Thug
did so well in 2024 was because of their visually
stunning 'Crown the Witch' staging of Doomsday Blue
. It was impressive, even with the sound turned down. In the case of Laika Party, Emmy is leaning into the science fiction aspect and will perform atop a platform, drenched in purple neon lighting and with a back projection of a twinkling starfield. However, there has been some tweaking following dress rehearsals.
'We have made some changes after the first rehearsal. In the first rehearsal, I saw the props and the stage for the first time, and that was very big,' Emmy said.
'We had to change a bit of the choreography and my placement on stage because of that and also, I had some rails on the rocket, because I'm standing on top, but the team didn't think it looked that great on camera so we now removed the rails.'
When is Emmy performing?
Ireland has been drawn in Thursday night's second semi-final. Emmy is third in the running order between Montenegro and Latvia. The early start is regarded as putting her at a disadvantage, as statistically, songs that appear later in the broadcast tend to fare better.
[
'RTÉ said we don't have any problem with Emmy. We have an Irish writer on the team': Ireland's Eurovision singer from Norway
Opens in new window
]
How will the song do?
Ten of Thursday's 16 entrants will go on to the grand final after a public vote, and Emmy is expected to make the cut. But she is seen as an outsider for the contest proper – with odds at 66/1. On Saturday, the successful semi-finalists are joined by the 'big five' who are guaranteed a place in the final due to their financial contribution to Eurovision: Spain, France, Germany, the UK and Italy.
Any clue who will win?
Sweden is determined to eclipse Ireland's seven Eurovision wins and become the only nation with eight victories. To that end, Sweden's 'comedy' pop trio KAJ are favourites in 2025, with their song Bara Bada Bastu having odds of 5/4. Others regarded as in the running are Austria (9/4), France (9/1) and Israel (12/1).
Wasn't there controversy about the Israeli entry?
The continued participation of the country is regarded as controversial by many. The country is represented by Yuval Raphael, a 24-year-old singer and survivor of the mass killing by
Hamas
of attendees at the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. RTÉ has called on Eurovision organisers, the European Broadcast Union (EBU), to discuss Israel's participation. In an open letter to the EBU, 72 musicians associated with Eurovision demanded the exclusion from the contest of Israeli national broadcaster Kan, which, they said, was 'complicit in Israel's genocide against the
Palestinians
in
Gaza
and the decades-long regime of apartheid and military occupation against the entire Palestinian people'. Signatories
included 1994 Ireland winner Charlie McGettigan
.
Will the controversy around Israel affect the contest?
There were several flashpoints around Israel and Gaza at last year's contest: Bambie Thug, for instance,
was asked to remove Ogham script
saying, 'Ceasefire' and 'Freedom for Palestine'. This year, the EBU has changed the rules so that participants can only fly their national flag on camera. However, audience members will all be able to wave Palestinian flags. The EBU is also stepping up backstage protection of artists by creating 'no filming zones'.
How does voting work?
The semi-finals are decided based on a public vote. Participating countries will vote in the semi-final their country is in, though they cannot vote for their own representative. You can vote over the phone, by text or through the Eurovision app. For the final, the public vote will account for 50 per cent of marks, with the other half adjudicated by national panels. The experts' scores are based on the Friday night jury final performances, which take place behind closed doors.
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Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
If we want free-flowing hurling we must accept the refereeing that facilitates it
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Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
CMAT: ‘Ireland is a really hard place to live unless you have money, which we didn't'
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, or CMAT as she's professionally known, says she can clearly remember writing the song that changed her life. She was 22 and having moved from Ireland to Manchester, was working in TK Maxx and, at the weekends, as what she's fond of calling a 'sexy shots girl': 'Cash in hand, £8 an hour, 11pm to 3am, teetering up and down the stairs of a nightclub in the building where Joy Division shot the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart with a tray of Jägermeister shots they'd put a bit of dry ice in – burned your skin if you got it on your hands – selling them for £3 each. Terrible job. And just getting absolutely stoned out of my bin all the time, doing whatever drugs anyone would give me for free. I had absolutely no friends.' An attempt to get her musical career off the ground, 'trying to make hyperpop because I loved Charli XCX so much', had come to nothing. 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Americans think it's cute; English people are like, 'Ooh, I love Guinness and Kneecap and The Banshees of Inisherin , and I'm getting my Irish passport and mmm, I love potato farl.' People talking about Hozier like he's a magical, delicate fairy from the bog. It's a romanticised version of Ireland that doesn't exist. It's a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn't. So yeah, magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland: it's a shopping centre, that's what I grew up with. A shopping centre.' I'm aware of the fact that my career is going to struggle as a result of this stuff, but I also think everyone else in music needs a kick up the hole Ireland's recent history suffuses Euro-Country, which features vocals in Irish, songs called Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy and Tree Six Foive and a title track that she describes as 'a collage, a mood board' about the financial crisis that engulfed the country in 2008. 'I was about 12 and it all happened around me, it didn't really happen to my family directly,' she says. 'My dad had a job in computers, we didn't really have any money, we weren't affluent, but we were fine. Everybody else on the estate we lived in worked in construction, or in shops, and they all lost their jobs. Everybody became unemployed. Then, in the village I grew up in, there was a year or 18 months where loads of the people I went to school with, their dads started killing themselves because they'd lost everything in the crash.' Initially, Thompson thought she must have misremembered this. 'But I dug deep, did research and the amount of male suicides that happened in Ireland at that time was astronomical. When I hit secondary school, teenage boys started killing themselves as well; that was very common where I grew up. I think it was a kind of chain reaction as a result of the economic downturn. I'm not blaming anyone – no one ever purposely tries to cause that much harm. 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Last year, an Instagram video of her performing at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend festival attracted so much abuse – largely directed at her weight – that the BBC was forced to disable comments. She laughed it off at the time, suggesting she should be imprisoned for the crime of 'having a big fat ass', but returns to the subject on her current single, Take a Sexy Picture of Me (it has turned into that rarest of things: a song about body shaming that has provoked a TikTok dance trend, with it-girl Julia Fox and Chicken Shop Date host Amelia Dimoldenberg participating). 'Prior to moving over to the UK I would never have thought I was plus size,' she says. 'And then I started working with fashion directors in London for photoshoots and started hearing: 'Wow, you're so lucky I collect plus-size Mugler because no one else will be able to dress you.' I thought: what are you talking about? I'm a size 14! I thought everyone was this size! Why are you being so weird? 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[ CMAT on launching her second album: 'This has been the great joy of my life to be able to do this' Opens in new window ] Thompson says she is aware that the political bent of Euro-Country is a big ask of audiences in 2025, when pop seems to largely function as a means of temporary escape from a terrifying world. 'It can be read as incredibly cringe and incredibly earnest and on the nose, right? It's an embarrassing thing for me to be asking of people. Because it's not trendy to be earnest any more. I'm aware of that, and ...' She laughs again. 'Actually I don't care. I don't care if I'm putting my foot in it, I don't care if I'm saying something wrong. We've all been too measured, too careful because we're being witnessed all the time. I think we need more willingness to fail. Even if it's futile, you've got to f**king try. Because it's f**king depressing otherwise.' – The Guardian Euro-Country is released via CMATBaby and Awal on August 29th
Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
Timing of Hell for Leather ideal as viewers reminded why Gaelic football is GAA's code with furthest reach
Midway through the first episode of Hell for Leather, RTÉ's elegant five-part series on the history and nature of Gaelic football, we see a clip of a young boy at some kind of GAA family fun day. With his face painted like a lion, he embarks on a hectic solo run. He chips the ball over the head of the first defender and closes his eyes as he catches it on the bounce. Then tries a toe-to-hand that flies up above his head, but he keeps running, improvising as he goes, like jazz. The camera never loses sight of the boy's enraptured face and, in the slow-motion sequence, every movement he makes with the ball is uninhibited. His relationship with the game has yet to be polluted by systems and strategies and all the paraphernalia of risk management that, until recently, threatened to destroy Gaelic football. The clip is underlaid by interview footage from Juliet Murphy, the eight-time All-Ireland winner with Cork . 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