3 May 2003
I remember a lot of genuine good will for Mickey Joe Harte and ‘We’ve Got The World’. (The single and the Eurovision entry are credited to Mickey Harte. Perhaps the colloquial ‘Joe’ was considered infra dig for those formalities, or the domestic distinction from the Gaelic football manager of the same name unnecessary for the wider world.) Relegation after a bad 2001 result meant Ireland hadn’t been let into the previous year’s contest. Recent Irish entries had mostly been blustery AOR ballads anyway. Plus, Mickey Joe had won his Eurovision place by popular vote. He seemed happy to be there: his years of experience slogging the Irish singer-songer circuit gave him the chops for the job and the awareness to appreciate it. (The major design flaw of the You’re A Star national final model would only become painfully apparent in subsequent years.)
It helped that ‘We’ve Got The World’ was easy to get behind. Yes, there was the unfortunate proximity of its chorus to one that had won Eurovision only a couple of years beforehand, and that wasn’t even a Eurovision all-time-great winner. However, ‘We’ve Got The World’ is energetic and solid. Much as with our 2023 entry, that chorus meets the classic latter-day Eurovision brief of being big and positive. I could have done without the climactic key change, of course, and I suspect Mickey Joe could have done without it too. Still, on balance I’m positively disposed to ‘We’ve Got The World’: it’s a rare Irish Eurovision entry that caught the mood of its moment and got the measure of success it deserved.
