The British are coming!
And the Belgians, Americans, Germans... etc.

In consumption terms radio remains a largely local affair. The news and current affairs orientation of Irish talk radio ensures this: Irish may have online access to a cornucopia of tens of thousands of stations across the globe but they remain concerned with what’s happening here, now, less so what’s happening over there.

On television, however, the dominance enjoyed by local players (and mainly RTE) in the 20th century is a thing of the past. In an era when most homes received their television via terrestrial analogue means, proximity to the physical distribution network mattered. The arrival of cable during the rather (sub)urbanisation of the 1970s, gave residents of new housing estates across the country access to UK channels, and split the country in “multi-channel land” and “the rest”. (No longer could one make a boast of “We have both channels. RTE 1 and 2.”) With the arrival of satellite distribution in the 1980s and switch to digital encoding,  six channels became ten, then twenty, until today where even a basic cable or satellite package offers hundreds of channels to those willing to explore the nether regions of their Electronic Programme Guides.

The resulting fragmentation of television viewership gradually diminished the market shares of Irish-based channels. While RTE and Virgin Media Television Ireland remain market leaders, Irish-faced but overseas-based channels account for a (bare) majority of channel share of viewing.

Besides the straightforward consumption of foreign newspapers, the local adaptation of UK-based titles is a noteworthy feature of the Irish market.

In 1988, the Independent News and Media partnered with the British owners of the Daily Star tabloid to launch an “Irish Edition” blending UK and Irish content. This model was subsequently adopted by other UK papers seeking to expand their circulation in the Irish market. The (Irish) Daily Mirror and the (Irish) Daily Star are owned by UK-based Reach PLC since 2020.

News Corporation’s investment of significant sums in localising their titles for the Irish market from the 1990s established what appeared to be a firm foothold in the Irish market for The (Irish) Sun and The Sunday Times (Ireland Edition).

The (Irish) Daily Mail and the (Irish) Mail on Sunday are owned by the UK-based Daily Mail and General Trust. While both paper’s editorial teams are based in Dublin and operate independently of the English Daily Mail title based in London. The website for this publication is dailymail.co.uk, - a UK based website and there is no local version for Ireland.

On the one hand, this created significant journalistic employment and added to the diversity of content available to Irish readers. On the other hand, a lot of content consumed by Irish audiences is subject to considerations beyond the immediate political, cultural and commercial needs of Irish audiences - be it political, social or more mundane matters, British content trickles down from international politics, to football news and gossip columns.

In radio, RTE was the only (legal) game in town until the passage of the 1988 Radio and Television Act paved the way for local and national commercial radio. For the first decade of their operation the 26 stations initially licenced by the Independent Radio and Television Commission were all owned by Irish-based individuals or consortia. A strict ownership and control policy also meant that no group owned more than one station. However, with the relaxation of those rules in 2001, some consolidation of ownership commenced, led by figures like Denis O’Brien (who, by 2004, owned 98FM, Spin and had a stake in Newstalk) and Thomas Crosbie Holdings. The commercial success of the Irish stations also attracted international interest and by the mid-2000s, UK players such as Scottish Radio Holdings and EMAP had made acquisitions of sound broadcasting services.

At the start of 2016, radio as the one sector still largely left in Irish hands. In addition to RTE, the two major groups were Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp, which included both of the  national commercial stations and the UTV-owned Wireless Group which included six local stations in the Republic of Ireland. But, as in other media sectors, better capitalised foreign investment moved in. In July 2016, even as Liberty Global was acquiring UTV Ireland, News Corporation moved to purchase the Wireless Group. Perhaps, more surprising, given that involvement in Irish radio dated back to his securing of the licence for Classic Hits/98FM in 1989, in 2021, Denis O’Brien agreed to sell Communicorp in its entirety to the German Bauer Media.

The narrative of print media in Ireland since 1995 sees four Irish-based and Irish-owned newspaper groups – Independent News and Media, the Irish Times, Thomas Crosbie Holdings and the Irish Press PLC – whittled down to two by 2018. Though only finally wound up in 2017, the Irish Press PLC ceased publication in 1995. The Irish Times Designated Activity Company acquired what remained of the 177-year-old Thomas Crosbie Holdings group in 2018. This left Independent News and Media (INM) as the other indigenous news group, the two largest shareholders of which were Irish businessman Denis O’Brien and Dermot Desmond. However, having built up his stake in INM just a decade earlier, in 2019, Denis O’Brien (along with Dermot Desmond) elected to sell his stake to the mid-sized Belgian newspaper group Mediahuis which already operated across Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany. In May 2021, INM disappeared and Mediahuis Ireland was formally adopted as the group’s new identity.

The Radio and Television Act of 1988 created a national commercial television licence. The successful consortium, Windmill Lane, initially struggled to secure capital for the venture. Only when international investors such as CanWestGloba added their resources did the channel appear to be viable and the resulting channel – TV3 – didn’t go on air until 1998, nearly a decade after it was originally licenced. CanWest’s investment was subsequently augmented by that of ITV PLC effectively making TV3 a regional franchise of UK commercial television. By 2000, the stake of the original Irish investors in the channel had dropped to 10% of (non-voting) shares. Even that share would eventually disappear as TV3 was acquired first by UK venture capital fund Doughty Hanson in 2006 and then to US cable giant Liberty Global in 2015. The acquisition included two channels, TV3 and a sister channel E3, the result of the acquisition of the ailing other Irish commercial channel Channel 6 in 2009. This left only one other Irish commercial channel: UTV Ireland which had launched in January 2015. This competition proved short-lived: In July 2016, Liberty Global purchased UTV Ireland from ITV PLC and rebranded all three channels under its established cable distribution marque Virgin Media.