Broadcasting in Ireland (1978) outlines the historical and sociological background of Ireland to place the progress of its broadcasting service in the context of its post-independence development. It analyses the difficulties of running public service broadcasting financed by both licence fee and advertising, and competing in half its television reception area with two of the premier broadcasting systems in the world. With regular broadcasting beginning with Independence, its development was inevitably bound up with the process of building the political, economic and social framework of the new State, and this book closely examines how the Irish broadcasting system coped with the attending economic, cultural and political difficulties.

This book explores the question of how society has changed with the introduction of private screens. Taking the history of television in Ireland as a case study due to its position at the intersection of British and American media influences, this work argues that, internationally, the transnational nature of television has been obscured by a reliance on institutional historical sources. This has, in turn, muted the diversity of audience experiences in terms of class, gender and geography. By shifting the focus away from the default national lens and instead turning to audience memories as a key source, A Post-Nationalist History of Television in Ireland defies the notion of a homogenous national television experience and embraces the diverse and transnational nature of watching television. Turning to people’s memories of past media, this study ultimately suggests that the arrival of the television in Ireland, and elsewhere, was part of a long-term, incremental change where the domestic and the intimate became increasingly fused with the global.

It has become apparent that Northern Ireland feels left behind in UK broadcasting terms. Levels of production are comparatively low. Northern Ireland producers find it difficult to win commissions from the UK's major broadcast organisations. Digital switchover, already under way in some parts of the UK will not occur in Northern Ireland until 2012. Nor, since UTV remains strong enough to provide news in competition with the BBC, will Northern Ireland benefit from public money proposed for new independently funded news consortia. The evidence the Committee received confirms and demonstrates that Northern Ireland is the least well served of the UK's four nations in terms of network production that reflects and portrays its life and in the amount of network programming produced there. The Committee makes a number of recommendations to remedy this.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "Appendix : ... recordings of works by Irish composers in RTÉ Sound Archives / compiled by Richard Pine and Joan Murphy." -- p. [vii].

The first indepth history of the controversies surrounding the establishment of Radio Telefis Eireann.

Analysing historical and contemporary examples, this book offers a thematically-informed synthesis of influential research on Irish audio-visual culture.

Within the growing field of TV series studies, little work has yet been done on Ireland. This volume fills the gap by offering new and compelling studies of contemporary Irish TV series. It argues that there is a distinctly Irish culture of TV fiction series and examines some of its finest examples, from Father Ted to Love/Hate and Sin Scéal Eile.