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owlfish at 10:54pm on 11/02/2011 under eurovision
owlfish at 10:54pm on 11/02/2011 under eurovisionI was just watching the competition streamed from Irish television, for choosing Ireland's 2011 Eurovision entry. (It'll probably be another hour until voting's done.)
The most interesting thing about the songs recap was that it included instructions on how people in Northern Ireland could vote. That's a different country. Surely, they should be voting for the UK's entry, not Ireland's. Do they get to double-vote there?
P.S. Strongest entry won, squeaking victory by a smidgen over the other strongest entry: Jedward will be in the Eurovision semi-finals.
The most interesting thing about the songs recap was that it included instructions on how people in Northern Ireland could vote. That's a different country. Surely, they should be voting for the UK's entry, not Ireland's. Do they get to double-vote there?
P.S. Strongest entry won, squeaking victory by a smidgen over the other strongest entry: Jedward will be in the Eurovision semi-finals.
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Edited to add: I think
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b) Ireland had a referendum quite a few years ago abolishing articles 2 and 3 of the constitution which claimed Northern Ireland. At the same time, Northern Ireland had a vote on the Belfast Agreement.
It was a painful choice for a lot of people, even those who felt that the claim was completely ridiculous - nonetheless, there was a 94% vote in favour of abolishing the claim. Similarly, I know people in Northern Ireland who wanted the Belfast Agreement to go through even though it was against everything they'd been brought up to believe - they either voted yes or abstained (including my sibling's in-laws, who couldn't bring themselves to vote "yes" but refused to vote "no") and the vote went through with 71% in favour. A huge swing, considering the political breakdown in NI.
In turn, people from Northern Ireland were able to claim citizenship of both the UK and Ireland and the UK undertook to treat Irish people living in the UK exactly the same as if they were UK citizens (which was pretty much the case anyway - I already had a parliamentary vote in the UK due to the reciprocal agreement, this merely solidified the agreement.
Ireland most definitely recognises Northern Ireland as part of the UK and has done so for well over a decade officially. Practically, it has done so since the late 1920s at the very least.
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I wonder what other regions are divided up that way, not along country lines, but broadcasting zones.
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Edited: No, you're right the first time as you thought. NI votes with Ireland for the finals too.
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There may be history whereby NI also gets to vote in the Irish choice (and public choice is comparatively recent in Eurovision), but I cannot see how NI could possibly be excluded from the UK vote in turn. NI has the BBC as the state broadcaster, but Ireland (*not* Eire, unless we're having this conversation as Gaelige) has RTE as its state broadcaster.
RTE broadcasts reach NI. BBC Ulster broadcasts reach as far south as Wicklow on the old bandwidth, while BBC Wales reaches Wexford and Wicklow.
Even for something as comparatively unimportant as Eurovision, there would have been riots if it had been suggested that the majority of people in Northern Ireland were being excluded from the country they identified as theirs by the EBU.
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Firstly: sbisson, above, wrote that NI is part of Ireland for European Broadcast Association purposes. (Although that did - and still - leaves me wondering about the BBC!)
Then, when I searched superficially online, I found a Wikipedia article or two telling me that NI votes with Ireland in Eurovision, or at least, has done so in specific recent years. (Obviously, this is in no way a conclusive source, but it was backing sbisson up.) Also, having a cluster of people from a given place doesn't mean a thing in terms of Eurovision representation, but there were three acts from NI competing for the Irish nomination two years ago.
Edited to add: None of this is at all definitive of course, and it could be that the article is wrong, and it's always true that the nomination vote in no way needs to map onto the rules for the "real" voting of Eurovision.
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As far as I can tell NI have to vote with the UK which is actually a bit of a cheat in terms of the not being able to vote for your own country thing (but I assume the smaller Eastern European countries have just the same swing due to someone from one country just living 10 miles down the road in another country) but as a result that means we vote disproportionately highly for Eire.
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Just because NI is allowed, by RTE and the Irish government, to vote in the Irish selection, does not mean that it is automatically barred by its own country.
The UK (and it does compete as "Royaume Uni", not "Grande Bretagne" in Eurovision) is not having a national song contest this year - Blue have been selected without any reference to the public.
Allowing NI to vote in the Irish national song contest is not the same as NI being allowed to exercise two votes in Eurovision itself.
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I conflate. I meant that people living in NI could vote in two nations' song contests if this is true. Given how Eurovision works, any given person could vote dozens or hundreds of times in each.
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