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TG4 celebrates its 18th Birthday this Halloween
29 Oct 2014 : Deirdre Molumby
Oireachtas na Gaeilge
The founding of TG4 started as a long campaign by Irish language activists and others to have a separate TV channel in the Irish language, similar to what Wales had accomplished in the 1980s. TG4 started airing on the Celtic festival day of Oíche Shamhna (Halloween night) in 1996, initially as a part of the RTÉ family but with the understanding that once the legislative landscape allowed it, they would become their own independent entity. This happened in April 2007 and the channel is now available in all delivery platforms, including on the freeview platform in Northern Ireland and on satellite. TG4 content is now available worldwide through its player online also.

Pádhraic Ó Ciardha, the station’s deputy chief executive, talked to us about the channel’s status now: “Given the huge diaspora and interest in Irish cultural affairs generally and in TV content particularly, we’re now a global player. We’ve seen a huge change in the broadcasting landscape and the television industry itself. Ireland is now probably the most competitive TV market in Europe with scores, hundreds of TV channels in the dominant language of English available now.

“Our USP really is the language - we are the world’s only Irish language television service, so we do stand out. Our ratings may be small, our market share may be smaller than others, but the challenges haven’t changed. People now expect high quality content, and we have a track record of award-winning content across all the genres from kids to documentary to sport to music.”

He continues: “Our funding has gone back slightly in the last couple of years and that remains a challenge, but the great exciting achievement has been not just the content but the growth of the production sector. We are Ireland’s first publisher broadcaster – that is to say we are a television channel for which 90% of the content comes from independent production companies. It has been a great achievement to see that sector grow and win awards for its content through Ireland’s IFTA awards but also internationally through the Celtic Media Festival and others. Most recently, we have the film version of the series ‘An Bronntanas’ going forward as Ireland’s contender for the Best Non-English Language Oscar and we’re really exciting about how that’s going to play out.”

The channel plans to celebrate its birthday in a low-key, community-centred way: “We like to let our content do the talking, we’re not really a channel that believes a lot in self-congratulation and on-screen celebrations of that kind.

“Besides the celebration of Oíche Shamhna, this week is also, as it happens, the week in which the major Irish language festival, Oireachtas na Gaeilge, takes place, so we’ll be featuring a lot of content from that festival, which takes place in the INEC centre in Killarney. We’ll be doing a lot of live broadcast there such as news and music as well as singing and dancing competitions. So that’s where we see our celebration, not in black tie events. Ours is a very much community centred-people-centred service and that’s what our audience expects.”

So what’s next for the channel? “There is clearly a huge appetite for language learning. That’s not the only reason people watch television, of course, but people do listen to the radio and watch TV in order to improve their fluency in Irish. That’s something we’d like to address and we think the development of the player and the internet is a way to do that, in other words, that you would deliver a multi-platform resource, some of which is a TV programme, some of which would be online and maybe interactive with individual students so they can have their work rated and marked through either social media or the internet. That’s a challenge we look forward to addressing.

“There are huge technical developments as well – we have to find a way of delivering access to our content to those not fluent in Irish in a way that doesn’t alienate those who are fluent. Put simply, we’re trying very hard to find a way that people can select or deselect subtitles at home. We don’t currently have the technology that allows us to deliver that option and that’s a big challenge for us. Then there are the usual technical challenges. We’ve transitioned to HD now but who knows, probably the next development might be super HD, or 3D, though I think that’s further away. We need to keep abreast of that without losing that individual, intimate connection we have with people.

“We have a huge approval rating and TG4 is probably the most positive thing that’s happened for Irish, certainly in my lifetime, and it’s something that is attractive and inclusive. Those are attributes that we’d always want to cherish.”





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