television

television first reached Ireland from Great Britain. By 1960 a significant proportion of homes on the east coast had aerials permitting them to receive BBC and Independent Television programmes, either from Great Britain or from Northern Ireland, where BBC television broadcasts had begun in 1955 and Ulster television in 1959.

An Irish television service was inaugurated on 31 December 1961. It was a public service broad‐caster, financed by a combination of licence fees and advertising revenue, and supervised by a government appointed body, the Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE) Authority, established in 1966, replacing the Radio Éireann (see radio) authority. The advent of RTE, broadcasting to the whole country, greatly increased the number of potential viewers. By 1963 about one‐third of Irish households had television licences, rising to more than 90 per cent by the early 1980s. However, the output of British stations continued to attract a wide Irish audience, expanded by the advent of cable, which by 1984 had given two‐thirds of all households access to good‐quality reception of British television stations. When a second Irish television channel, RTE2, was launched in 1978, commercial realities and consumer pressure combined to ensure that its main function was to repackage popular BBC and ITV programmes for transmission to those parts of the country where they could not be received directly. Although RTE's own output, notably in current affairs, drama (especially certain long‐running serials), and light entertainment, gained a secure place in popular culture, the proportion of home‐produced material shown declined from around two‐thirds in the first years of the station to only 30 per cent by the 1980s. RTE2 was relaunched as Network 2 in 1988. An Irish language station, Teilifís na Gaeilge, later TG4, was launched in October 1996.

Irish television was created at the beginning of a decade of cultural transformation and political debate. In consequence its relationship with the authorities in church and state was more fraught than that of radio had ever been. The discussion programme The Late, Late Show (1962– ) was involved in a series of controversies arising out of frivolous or iconoclastic studio discussion of previously sacrosanct personalities and doctrines. The current affairs programme Seven Days (1966– ) regularly incurred disapproval for what were in Ireland novel techniques of investigative reporting. In 1966 the Fianna Fáil government, objecting to reporting of its dispute with the Irish Farmers' Association, provoked controversy by its claim that RTE, as a state broadcasting service, was ‘an instrument of public policy’. From 1969 the main focus of conflict has switched to reporting of the revived Northern Ireland conflict.

In 1971 the government issued an order under section 31 of the Broadcasting Act of 1960 restricting reports on the activities of illegal organizations. The following year the entire RTE authority was dismissed for having sanctioned an interview with an IRA spokesman. Restrictions were further tightened in 1976 and remained a source of controversy until their removal following the IRA ceasefire in 1994.