Dee Forbes banging the RTE TV licence drum again 60m uncollected fee *poll not working - pl ignore*

Could, But they didn't! Only 20,000 TV sets in 1959, mostly in Dublin so that influence was minimal. Most people in Ireland didn't get BBC TV not to talk of Channel 4 in the 60s and 70s.

Born in Cork from her Wikipedia bio.

Regards...jmcc

When you say urban, are we talking about east coast?

I ask because reception was very patchy inland, we were west of the black stairs mountains and it was mostly static we got, whereas the cousins in Wexford had good reception.

I think the belief that the UK channels were in most homes in the 80s is perhaps a very easy coast centric view.

Thanks for that clarification. We had none of that growing up. Tall aerials was the most common way of receiving signal around me, very few had a good signal. If I remember correctly damp weather meant good reception, good dry weather meant static.

From the 1970s (even the 1960s) Dublin was a hodge podge of cable companies providing access to BBC 1, 2, UTV and in some cases also HTV (Channel 4 starts broadcasting in 1982). This hodge podge includes RTÉ's RTÉ Relays. In the 1980s many would merge with their counterparts in Galway and Waterford to make up Cablelink, RTÉ and Rodgers of Canada owned this company initally until Rodgers discovered that the government weren't going to let Cablelink provide Telephony services due to the Telecom Éireann Monopoly. Rodgers would sell to Telecom Éireann and before the IPO of Eircom they would ask to sell their 75% of Cablelink, RTÉ would then be asked to sell their 25% share of Cablelink, earning them 300m from the sale to NTL.

NTL would later merge with Chorus becoming Chorus NTL and later rebrand as UPC and now known as Virgin Media.

Both BBC2 and C4 would have been consider the more "progressive" channels, both ITV and BBC would be regarded as move "conservative" in their output, both being far more popular than either BBC2 or C4.

MMDS and Deflectors all had a role in this in rural areas also.

RTÉ2 would carry many of the UK programmes also, though as I say I was surprised they didn't take EastEnders and Brookside on their arrival in the 1980s.

In other news

It doesn't have to be received all over the country to have an influence, if it was influencing people in Dublin, they were writing in newspapers, writing books etc it was influencing the culture all over the country indirectly. It was indirectly affecting the TV RTE produced also.

Why are we paying the higher ups in there when they need someone else to tell them how to do their job?

This would get the ratings, different canteen inmate guest presenter every week...

You have to pay good money to attract people who's job it is to get advice from others!

Latest AFAIK

Depends on where one sat on the political spectrum I suppose...

The mere rumour that lesbian ex-nuns were going to appear on TLLS had them whipping out their rosary beads and hightailing it to Donnybrook for a good aul' vigil.

25 years ago I lived (in a house share) not far from Montrose, the area was far from the radical liberal enclave it was often depicted as. That part of Clonskeagh was like a southern US dry county, no pubs! Mount Merrion [*] (just up the road) is/was pretty conservative - back then it was still populated by sons of the soil who went up to the big smoke in the 1950s with a cardboard suitcase held together with twine and worked their way up to high positions in the public service and semi-states. Fair play to 'em I suppose (dey tuk ur jobs) but just because they were living slap bang in Montrosia didn't mean they fit the cliche. A ballot box-by-box analysis would show this but that's getting in too deep even for most political correspondents.

This rather illiberal candidate lived just off the same road as me at the time and actually got elected onto the council in the second half of the 90s. Went on to become one of the main spokespersons for Coir:

In Dun Laoghaire in 1997 this guy got 2000 votes in a general election. Way off being elected, but still a lot:

[*] This is where the Josepha Madigan no-priest-turned-up-for-mass "scandal" occurred. Anywhere else in Dublin they'd be wondering what non-OAPs were doing there in the first place.

I know it’s not exactly the same, but where I worked they had a Company Doctor, and in the case of an employee being on long term sick, the employee could be referred to the Co Dr for an assessment of their fitness to work. It didn’t matter if they had a sick cert and, of course, it wasn’t a process someone who had a terminal illness or serious accident would have to go through. It was very effective in dealing with those who needed to be dealt with. Just a thought

Cablelink was known as "The Pipe" back in the day.

Answered on Feb 8th.

Interesting she effectively gives the go ahead in that answer: -

You'd wonder why the minister would give an explanatory note on the reasons for dropping these services. Also there is no savings if RTÉ do not replace the +1's with commercial alternatives, cost of those broadcasts get subsumed into the other services on Saorview.

And as I read it she gives no explanation for the removal of the digital stations.

Another PQ to the minister where she seems not to answer

1. she should have answered An Post does not come under the Remit of the Department of Media
2. she should have then suggested the PQ go to the relevant minster (Eamon Ryan)
3. she could have got her Civil Servants to call An Post for the information.