There was a moment during the 'Eurosong' Late Late Show when VFTB almost succumbed to a 'Donnie Darko' hallucination. It came at the very end, as Pat Kenny and Brian Kennedy raised each other's arms in a gesture of entirely bewildering triumph. The docile Late Late audience had been reunited with its complan, having done its sleepy duty and sent Kennedy's own song to Eurovision. The two happy titans of the mediocracy beamed waves of pleasure back at them. Did they give each other a kiss? I can't remember. What I do remember is the walls of my set merging with the rest of the room, which itself had dissolved into the fuzzy, rushing quantum flux Frodo Baggins sees whenever he unwisely puts on his ring. I shivered violently at what I thought was the sight of two fearsome wraiths, intensely hooded, intensely middle of the road, with gaping maws of middle aged fire, raising arms in a frenzy of tired self-satisfaction. Let the hosts go forth from Mordor! Orthodoxy is restored. We'll show those backward Balkans how you really win a senile non-talent contest.

Once the hallucination had departed, I felt, in a curious way, more violated than if I'd just sat through three hours of Daniel O' Donnell, or the collected speeches of Kim Jong Il (whichever is longer). Orthodoxy was indeed restored. Donna and Joe were there, but weren't called upon to sing. That strapping young wan, Linda Martin, however, was allowed to beguile the Late Late's core audience - which is clearly aged somewhere between 75 and 99 - with visions of their lost youth.

The country's - or at least the Late Late audience's - Top 10 favourite Irish Eurovision entries told us everything we already knew about who really props up this colossus of self-satisfaction, this Babel of the banal. In at 10 was Ireland's first ever Eurovision entry, from way back in 1965, the late Butch Moore singing 'Walking The Streets In The Rain.' Dickie Rock's effort from a year later was right after it, and yes, Dickie got to sing (just try and stop him). Could the under 75's be forgiven for thinking that if Ireland had an entry from 1955 - or indeed 1855 - it would have featured in the top ten? Jaysus, instead of spending money on the meretricious yawnfest that the Late Late has become, why don't they just show footage of Ronan Collins presenting his midday show from Radio One? They'd save a fortune - and hold on to most of the audience.

It ended, of course, if such jamborees of the mediocracy can be said to have an end, with Kennedy's entirely predictable, entirely stage managed triumph. Never mind the fact that allowing the designated singer to enter his own song is the most outrageous conflict of interest since Richard Nixon attempted to investigate his own transgressions in Watergate, sure we never get too worked up about that kind of thing in Late Late land.

But why are others getting so exercised? This, perhaps, is the most worrying thing of all. Why all the national angst about an annual cavalcade of songs and singers so bland and boring that they fade from memory long before they've even left the stage? The sad truth is that 50 years of Eurovision has produced just one good song and one act memorable for something other than having had gender surgery or wearing a silly costume. Whether you loathe or love Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, Abba's 'Waterloo' was rousing, technically clever and even original, all qualities remarkable for having come unscathed through the creative Chernobyl that is Eurovision. With the exception of Bucks Fizz, a relatively short lived set of British Abba clones from the 80's, Abba are the only act to ever achieve major success after Eurovision.

That's one successful act and one decent song - out of God knows how many thousands - in fifty years. No wonder Ireland's mediocracy love this gig so much. There's no danger of anyone getting found out.

Yet, as lissom young Linda assures us, the powers that be in music are watching. Why? Are they starved of decent laughs? Is our utterly ludicrous passion about Eurovision rooted in an aimless lust to fill the emptiness left behind by our departing remnants of a culture?

At this point, of course, it might behove us to wonder just what will happen if the Balkans decide they don't much care for Brian's buttery blandness, if they find his non-threatening falsetto more irritating than cuddly. "Every Song Is A Cry For Love" - is it? What about 'Aon Focail Eile?' If the Balkans turn out to be less docile than the Late Late's captives and fail to hand the Eurovision back to the mediocracy, will young Linda stop giving out about Donna and Joe? Will 'You're A Star' cease trying to cannibalise the hopes and dreams of young Irish people in order to prolong a few tedious mediocracy careers?

I bet I know which way the Late Late audience would vote. Sure that Kennedy fella was way too young. Send out Dickie the next time!

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Few things show just how stunted political debate has become in this country than last week's utterly absurd hullabaloo over Sean Haughey failing to become a Junior Minister. A Junior Ministry? For God's sake, there was a time when Haughey Senior used to hand them out like cheap party jokes. Remember when poor oul Jimmy McDaid got a senior Cabinet post for breakfast, then had to resign it by lunchtime? This week, the chatter focused on Sile De Valera, who hasn't even resigned yet. The airwaves are filled with all kinds of comically fretful journos, wondering just what type of fella the Taoiseach is at all. We have heard the most hilarious speculation about Bertie's secret motives, as allegedly opaque and clever as those of a chess grandmaster. Is he victimising poor old Sean so that the guy will top the poll in Dublin North Central next time out? The remarkable thing is that so much space is being devoted to something that really only matters to Sean Haughey, his family, and a few of his constituents. You'd swear there was nothing else going on in the country, which is probably just how Bertie likes it.

The most cunning of all, it seems, has devised his own version of political 'You're A Star' to keep Ireland's venal and vacuous national media occupied, while he gets on with the business of, eh, runnin' de country. Every so often, a la young Linda and 'Shrek' O' Connor, he'll drag some little backbencher out of obscurity, get his hopes up, then savage them live on national telly. The distraction this offers to a Dublin media which, admittedly, seems only too willing to be distracted, is enormous. Who said backbenchers were useless? Here's Bertie rewriting yet another law of politics.

It is a comment on how effectively the cunning one has neutered most of the national media that the corruption Tribunals began a new round of public hearings last week, but the print and airwaves are full of Sean Haughey and Sile De Valera. Those hearings have offered fascinating insights into the mentality of some Fianna Fail Councillors in Dublin during the relevant time. According to one, Fianna Fail was a pro-development party, so there was nothing wrong with getting a little money for voting the way you were going to vote anyway. This is a statement with enormous implications for the way our democracy has been run over the past thirty years, yet no one in the Dublin media wants to talk about it. Likewise, no one's talking about Eddie Hobbs, state capital projects running massively over-budget, the health services, the running into the ground of the postal service or the competence or otherwise of certain senior Ministers. Is it really that Bertie is so clever, or could our Dublin 4 betters simply not be bothered anymore?