THE OFFICIAL TWITTER account of the Houses of the Oireachtas momentarily forgot itself this evening – posting a quick jibe at RTÉ after Marty Whelan’s commentary for the Eurovision Song Contest semi-final fell foul of technical gremlins.

The opening 20 minutes or so of RTÉ’s broadcast of events in Düsseldorf went without Whelan’s dulcet tones after a failure in the broadcasting systems at the Esprit Arena – ultimately forcing Whelan to resort to reporting his commentary over a mobile phone.

As a result, when Whelan’s voice did finally materialise on the broadcast, the connection was understandably scratchy – leading RTÉ to display a series of on-screen captions apologising for the poor quality of the sound.

But some people noted the irony of an apology about the quality of sound during a broadcast known for its questionable musical quality – and among those people was whoever manages the Houses of the Oireachtas official Twitter account.

Thus, shortly before 8:40pm this evening, the following Tweet appeared from the Oireachtas account:

RTE just apologised for the poor quality of sound from the first semi final of Eurosong Contest LOL #eurovision

Sadly, the Tweet was deleted after a minute or so – presumably when the person behind it realised they had posted the message to the wrong account.

But if ever you face taunts for not getting into the Eurovision spirit, you can argue that your opinion had the backing of the national parliament – if only for a few seconds.