28 May 1992
A Eurovision This or That question for you: an Irish entry that’s good but unsuccessful, or one that’s bad but wins? In 2021 and 2022 we had the former, with neither Lesley Roy’s energetic ‘Maps’ nor Brooke Scullion’s smart ‘That’s Rich’ even making it out of the semi-final. In the ’90s we had four of the latter and another two as runners-up, as Ireland dominated that decade’s Eurovision. Ireland has now only reached the Eurovision final once since 2013, and after every semi-final disappointment the Irish public harks back to our ’90s sweep of glory. However, let’s be careful what we wish for.
I’ll damn ‘Why Me?’ with the faint praise of it being, by a continental kilometre, the best of our four ’90s Eurovision winners. As it was written by previous winner Johnny Logan and sung by previous runner-up Linda Martin, ‘Why Me?’ came with the Euro-smarts to be precision-tooled for victory: a melodramatic power ballad with a big, big chorus. That said, I could never reconcile the self-deprecating title and lyrics of the song—how come you, presumably a total catch, are slumming it with plain ol’ me?—with Linda Martin belting out that chorus triumphantly. Cognitive dissonance aside, the chorus was indeed triumphant and the song notably old-school: no Mariah-esque showboating here. This was only our fourth Eurovision victory in 22 years, a redemption story for Linda Martin, and national hero Johnny Logan again raising the Irish public mood, so it’d be harsh to blame them for the Eurovision overkill that follows. Give it a few years, and across Europe we will unite in asking: why us?
