Ireland’s state broadcaster RTÉ will not carry the Eurovision final this week and will instead air a 1996 episode of Father Ted, a pointed protest against Israel’s inclusion in the contest. The replacement programme is A Song for Europe, the episode in which Father Ted and Father Dougal perform My Lovely Horse and finish with nul points.
The move puts RTÉ squarely inside the growing Eurovision 2026 Israel boycott, as Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands and Iceland have also declined to send competitors to Austria. Singers and bands from 35 countries are still due to compete under the slogan “united by music,” but the broadcasters in several countries are using the contest night to make the opposite point: that the event should not go ahead unchanged while Israel remains in the lineup.
Graham Linehan, who co-created Father Ted, accused RTÉ of turning the sitcom into “a tool of antisemitic harassment” and called the decision “an act of pointed, gleeful counter-programming.” He also demanded the resignation of RTÉ director-general Kevin Bakhurst. The broadcaster did not respond publicly to those remarks in the facts provided, but the choice of the episode gives the protest an unmistakable edge: a comedy built around a deliberately terrible Eurovision song is now being used to snub the real thing.
The controversy grew after calls for the European Broadcasting Union to change its rules and deter countries from organising voting campaigns. Those demands came after concern that Israeli singer Yuval Raphael received the largest number of public votes last year and still finished second overall. For critics, that result raised the fear that the contest’s public vote can be gamed. For broadcasters pulling out now, it has become reason enough to step aside entirely.
That decision lands with extra force in Ireland, where Eurovision remains tangled up with national memory. Ireland won in 1992, again in 1993 and then with Rock ’n’ Roll Kids in 1994, before Father Ted aired from 1995 to 1998 and turned the contest into a comic obsession of its own. The sitcom’s 1996 Eurovision episode was built around a joke that the song had to be so dreadful it would prevent Ireland from winning and forcing the country to host the next edition.
Instead, Ireland went on to win again in 1996 for a seventh time, matching Sweden’s record. The later years were less kind. Some observers have blamed a run of defeats in part on Ireland’s decision in 2008 to enter Dustin the Turkey with Irelande Douze Pointe, a novelty entry that became part of the country’s long Eurovision folklore.
The friction now is bigger than one broadcast choice. Slovenia’s broadcaster plans documentaries under the theme Voices of Palestine instead of the grand final, while Spain’s broadcaster will run a music programme called The House of Music. Together, the moves show that the contest’s promise of easy unity is colliding with a very public split among European broadcasters over Israel’s participation.
For RTÉ, the message is simple and deliberate. On a night when Europe gathers around Eurovision, it will offer a parody of the contest instead of the contest itself, and use one of Irish television’s most beloved comedies to underline where it stands.
