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Sat 05 May 2007The burdens of democracyTV Review:Some prominent historians - the ones I've just made up - identify Ireland's three successive Eurovision Song Contestvictories in the early 1990s as the key indicator that the nation was ready to shake off its animal skins, cast away its stone tools and begin forming itself into a new imperial power, writes Donald Clarke.With this in mind, viewers could be forgiven for regarding the desperate scenes in Helsinki last Saturday as our own version of the first Sack of Rome. Certainly Marty Whelan sounded worn down by the grisly vista unfolding before him. As successive versions of Ruritania expressed their preference for caterwauling transvestites over the sober stylings of Dervish, Marty moved from emollient expressions of patriotic optimism to a series of weary exhalations and surly monosyllables. By the time the depths of our humiliation had become clear, the dubiously haired presenter - whose experiences on Celebrity Jigs 'n' Reelsmust, surely, have inured him to humiliation - was confining himself to sighing out the names of the countries queuing up to gob in our face. "Ukraine. . . Georgia. . . Belarus. . . "