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I
T wasn’t meant to be like this. In , the
minister for posts and telegraphs assured
the Dáil that local radio would “allow the
flexibility necessary for the development
of services which will meet a very wide range of
community needs and interests”.
All the buzzwords were there. Local radio
would be “community-based”; among others,
“youth organisations” would be consulted before
fully considered legislation was produced, taking
into account “social and cultural factors”. Pirate
radio stations, playing wall-to-wall Top Thirty
hits, would become a memory, replaced by truly
local radio stations.
Jim Mitchell’s promises came to nothing. It
was another minister, Ray Burke, who finally
ended the RTÉ monopoly on the airwaves, in
. The first independent-local-radio licences
were issued a year later.
Yet for all the promises of variety, there is a
sameness to local radio. Rather than competing
voices, in most parts of the country, there is a sin-
gle broadcaster, granted a legal monopoly. The
formula is almost always the same: a morning
talk show dealing with local issues, often
fuelled by whatever local councillor had
managed to come up with a suitably contro-
versial topic to stir controversy or, failing that,
phone-ins from listeners, then a mix of mid-
dle-of-the-road and country music through
lunchtime until the early evening, changing to
a more youth-orientated music mix later in the
evening. Highland Radio. Kfm. Shannonside.
Midlands fm. Southeast Radio. Highland
Radio. Same template: only the accent and the
altercation-of-the-day vary.
Outside of the mid-morning anchor show (and
maybe a late-night phone-in), voice is largely
absent, as listeners are given a diet of music. The
hourly news bulletin goes towards the news and
current affairs requirement, but is often generic.
Documentary programming is largely unknown,
though the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland
(BAI) provides up to % funding for it, from
the Sound+Vision programme.
Recession and internet competition may
mean local radio is no longer the licence to print
money it was once perceived as, but the licences
are still valuable enough that in five cases where
the BAI has invited ‘expressions of interest’ as
the licences come up for renewal, other groups
have expressed interest.
Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp is one of the
dominant players in the market. In addition
to controlling interests in the to independent
national stations – Today FM and Newstalk –
Communicorp holds shares in FM, Spin
and Phantom . (Dublin) and Spin Southwest
(Limerick/Kerry/Tipperary/Clare). Previously,
Communicorp also held shares in East Coast FM
(Wicklow) and Highland Radio (Donegal).
The second major force is UTV, with shares
in Q and FM (Dublin), FM and C
(Cork), LMFM (Louth, Meath), and Live
(Limerick). Some newspapers also hold radio
shares, including Landmark Media Investments
(successor to Thomas Crosbie Holdings, publish-
ers of the Irish Examiner and Sunday Business
Post), Rivermedia, and the Connacht Tribune.
Below the commercial stations are the
‘community radio’ stations, operating on a non-
commercial basis. Staffed largely by volunteers
– occasionally supplemented by FÁS training
schemes – their limited geographic reach means
most people have never heard a community
broadcast, even if they are within range of one.
Community radio stations are represented
by CRAOL, while commercial independents are
represented by the Independent Broadcasters
of Ireland (IBI). As Pat Rabbitte considers the
future of media ownership and broadcasting,
including a ‘screen tax’ on television, comput-
ers and mobile phones to replace the licence fee,
the IBI has already begun lobbying for a share
of the spoils, arguing that it provides a public
service, and is as entitled to a government rent
as RTÉ. Regulation of the sector is further com-
plicated by a sharing of responsibilities between
the department of communications, energy and
natural resources and Alan Shatter’s department
of justice and equality.
Rabbitte (or Shatter) may decide that the
blandness of commercial radio hardly qualifies it
for state subsidies, but the government is equally
unlikely to take the imaginative step of providing
significant new BAI funding to the community
radio stations. Community radio, free to the
demands of advertisers to deliver attractive
demographics, can be dangerously innovative,
giving a voice to people who have scant chance
of getting a hearing on national or local main-
stream frequencies. Irish governments have
never appreciated truly independent thought,
so community radio is likely to remain under-
funded, a ghetto for the dedicated and the few
who can scrape together desultory grants.
Gerard Cunningham has contributed to local and
national radio stations as a reporter and researcher,
and is one of the contributors to Scibernia, a science
podcast also broadcast on community radio station,
Near FM.
media
gerard cunningham
Formulaic Irish radio
Commercial radio is bland; community radio can be incendiary
The government is unlikely
to take the imaginative step
of providing signicant new
BAI funding community radio
stations
