Lithuania's We are the Winners may have got the maximum 12 points from Irish viewers of the Eurovision Song Contest earlier this month but it seems we are the losers when it comes to paying for our votes
Although the cost of telephone and SMS voting was as low as 12 cents in other European countries, Irish voters shelled out 60 cents every time they voted either by telephone or SMS. And the reason Irish voters were asked to pay more? Because we always pay more.
A spokesman for Digame, the German firm which managed the tele-voting system across the EU for the European Broadcast Union (EBU), said all broadcasters were asked to provide information on charges routinely applied for programmes involving phone or SMS voting and that amount determined the tariff. So the cost of voting in You're A Star, Celebrity Jigs and Reels and Celebrity Farm was the main factor in deciding voting price this time round.
The EBU forbids using the song contest's popularity - more than 750,000 people in the Republic watched the May 20th final - to make even more money than usual. The price of a Eurovision vote had to be "the same as the cost of voting for other shows on the channel", a Digame spokesman told The Irish Times.
A single vote in Britain cost just 25p (37 cents) while the Dutch were asked to pay two cents less than that. But German voters paid only 12 cents for every vote cast.
"Public broadcasters in Germany do not charge that much for tele-voting," the Digame spokesman said, so when it came to calculating the cost of Eurovision voting, it was considerably lower than the EU average. Had the song contest been broadcast by a private TV operator there then the charge would have been closer to 50 cents, he said.
He said Digame selected the service providers for each country "based on the advice of the broadcasters in each channel" but he was unable to disclose which firm was used to manage voting in the Republic for "security reasons".
RTÉ was less reticent and said Phonovation managed the telephone voting while Xiam Interactive handled the SMS voting. RTÉ said Digame had asked it for charges normally imposed but it was not directly responsible for deciding on the 60 cents tariff.
