Irish language radio has come quite a long way since the “old days”. Once confined to a few radio hours a day, there are some cool Irish language radio programs to listen to these days. What’s more, with podcasts or simple MP3 downloads you can catch archived shows without having to listen in to the Irish radio live.
Raidió na Gaeltachta (RnaG) is the local radio station for the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland, although it acts as the national Irish language radio station. It has several local studios around Ireland. It’s basically spread across three localities, Munster, Connacht, and Ulster. The different studios contribute different programs and news to the station.
RnaG is owned and operated by RTÉ, the national broadcaster of Ireland. The Irish language radio station used to time-share with “Radio 3″ which was a classical music station. However, RnaG now broadcasts 24 hours a day on its own frequency.
A long-standing rule at RnaG was that it was not allowed to play any English-language songs. This sounds fine theoretically, but it held the station back from providing up-to-date pop music for young people. It is of my opinion that this policy probably damaged the radio station for a long time. At the time, I had no interest in listening to Irish traditional music on a daily basis. Now that the rule has been lifted since around 2005, there are some great evening music shows that play both pop and indie music. These evening shows have been branded as AnochtFM. RnaG offer lots of archived Irish language radio programs to listen to, check out their web site.
Raidió Fáilte is a Belfast-based Irish language community radio station. It is most definitely a hip, cool, fun radio station. Of course, they broadcast live online. Raidió Fáilte landed a major coup by arranging a radio interview with Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionists Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland.
The BBC is quite surprisingly doing a great job with Irish language radio programming. They are said to have 40 hours of Irish language programs every week.
Raidió na Life is a Dublin-based local Irish radio program.
An up-coming trend is also for the English-language radio stations in Ireland to provide some programming through Irish Gaelic. My local radio station is called Spin South West. Their radio station Top 40 Oifigiúl na hÉireann features all the latest pop music, and is a great advertisement of the language for young people.