“When TG4 was established, people said, ‘This is a waste of money and we should be spending it on hospitals and roads and all the rest’,” says Deirdre Ní Choistín. Nowadays, you’re more likely to open up your X feed and see someone arguing for TG4 to “get all the licence fee”.
Maybe it’s the sultry late August weather here in Baile na hAbhann, Co Galway, where the árd stiúrthóir (director general) of TG4 has agreed to meet at the broadcaster’s headquarters. Maybe it’s just her disposition.
Either way, almost four months to the day since she stepped into the role, becoming the first woman to lead the broadcaster since its inception as Teilifís na Gaeilge (TnaG) in 1996, the Kildare native is feeling confident, not just about the future of TG4 but the Irish language itself and even – in contrast to much of the discussion about the sector these days – Irish broadcasting.
Sheltered in TG4’s airy boardroom from the blazing Connemara sunshine outside, Ní Choistín discusses her vision for the station over the six and a half years or so remaining of her term of office.
RM Block
There are a couple of priority items at the very top of her agenda – not least the perennial question of funding, but also the issue of regaining editorial control of TG4’s news output from RTÉ, a topic close to her heart.
First up, however, there is the small matter of the broadcaster’s all-important autumn schedule release. Trojan work has gone into the seasonal programming line-up, she says, which incorporates new series from returning favourites such as Hector Ó hEochagáin and Louise Cantillon, as well as new Irish language films such as rural murder mystery Báite and a host of new documentaries and other goodies.
Autumn is also budget season, when Ní Choistín and her colleagues find out their allotment for the year. Last year, TG4 was told it would receive €60 million to fund its activities in 2025, an increase of €3 million from 2024, but still well below the €78.6 million the broadcaster had targeted for the year in its post-Covid strategy document.
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Context is important, however. Under the previous minister for the Gaeltacht, arts and media, Catherine Martin, TG4’s annual budget had grown by 60 per cent in just five years from 2020. That was a “huge investment”, Ní Choistín says, that helped the broadcaster send Colm Bairéad’s 2022 film An Cailín Ciúin – a product of TG4’s Cine4 partnership with Screen Ireland and the then-Broadcasting Authority of Ireland – to the Oscars, among other successes.
TG4 is now looking for €10 million in Budget 2026 and another €10 million in Budget 2027 “just to fulfil our strategy”, she says. That strategy is centred on “growing young audiences” through initiatives including the Cúla4 children’s channel, which launched in 2023 and needs funding “to invest in, for example, drama content for kids”. Again, context is important. The targets outlined in its strategy document would, at the time, have only brought State funding for TG4 up to the level of Welsh-language public broadcaster S4C.
On Budget 2026, Ní Choistín has no sense yet whether TG4’s appeal will be successful, although she says her relationship with the current Minister, Patrick O’Donovan, is “great” and that the Fine Gael TD, who visited the station not long ago, “understands the value of TG4” as an Irish speaker himself.
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Yet, she says, “the way these things work, you don’t know until the week before, or sometimes the day of the budget”. That’s why public service broadcasters such as TG4 and the constellation of production companies that make its programming have been crying out for multiyear funding for years. It’s also something that RTÉ received as part of its €725 million agreement with the Government last year, covering 2025, 2026 and 2027.
The Coalition’s Broadcasting Amendment Bill is a transposition into law of the European Media Freedom Act, which stipulates that funding for public service media should be “adequate, sustainable and predictable”. Currently winding its way through the Oireachtas, the Bill is a “very positive and groundbreaking piece of legislation”, she says, that will provide that badly needed funding certainty for the sector as a whole.
TG4 also needs money to fulfil another part of its strategy: to bring news and current affairs programming back under its editorial control. Through a quirk of its statutory obligations, RTÉ currently supplies the Nuacht TG4 news service to TG4. Despite being largely produced in TG4’s Connemara studios, the broadcaster has no editorial control over the service, which prompted the Future of Media Commission to recommend in 2021 that the Irish language broadcaster be permitted to operate a fully independent news service. The Government agreed with the recommendation, but the transition has yet to happen.
Having served as TG4’s first-ever head of news and current affairs, Ní Choistín is particularly exercised about this matter. “That was one of my key motivators when applying for the job,” she says.
“I was head of news for three years, and part of the job was to deliver on this. It’s key to our audiences. Irish language audiences are as interested in news as English language audiences, so we need to give them a bigger, better service.”
As it stands, there is “little scope to expand the service”, despite the public appetite for it. TG4’s own research in 2021 suggested that 79 per cent of Irish language speakers primarily get their news online. Ní Choistín is hopeful the matter will be resolved long before her term is over, but steps will have to be taken soon. “The key thing to move things forward,” she says, “is that I think Coimisiún na Meán and the department need to put a timeline on it.”
Ní Choistín’s love of the Irish language began in school. She was born and raised in Kildare, attending one of the first Gaelscoileanna in the country, Scoil Chearbhaill Uí Dhálaigh in Leixlip.
“My dad was from the Rinn Gaeltacht in Waterford,” she says. “He left because there were no opportunities if he didn’t want to be farming. He went to college in Dublin, and then there was no way to go back or no reason to go back.” Ní Choistín delights in the fact that Nemeton TV, the company that produces TG4’s sports output, is based in An Rinn and that there’s “a whole generation” of people who’ve stayed there because of the employment it has created.
Her mother is from Carlow and, by contrast, “doesn’t have a word of Irish”, she says. A young Ni Choistín became interested in attending the school after hearing an advert on the radio. It was a “big risk” to send their daughter to an early Gaelscoil in the early 1980s.
“It was a prefab on the side of a GAA pitch,” she recalls. “We didn’t have enough classrooms for all the kids, so we’d have half days when rang a haon and rang a dó would be in the morning, and junior and senior in the afternoon.”
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Humble though the facilities were at that time, she has “really happy memories” of the school, from which her love of the language blossomed. “We had great teachers from all the Gaeltachtaí,” Ní Choistín says. “So, one year, I had a teacher from Connemara, another year a teacher from Gaoth Dobhair, another year, from Kerry. It was just a great place. I’m still surprised at where people from Scoil Chearbhaill Uí Dhálaigh would pop up in my life to this day, even though I’m 25 years in Galway.”
Broadcasting has changed dramatically in that quarter of a century. With the rise of streaming, the death of linear television – the traditional medium which follows a set schedule – has been long-predicted. Ní Choistín thinks it’s more nuanced than that.
“Everyone says it’s dead,” she opines. “It’s not. But the audience patterns have completely changed. People don’t sit down to watch drama series every week any more. They want the box set – that Netflix viewing pattern. So, what we have to do, the same as every other public service media organisation, is respond to audience behaviours and needs, and the technology also has to correspond and move towards that.”
Rather than killing traditional television, the popularity of watching it over the internet is “going to create new opportunities for broadcasters”, Ní Choistín believes. The future of Irish public service broadcasting probably looks something like the Freely service in the UK, a joint venture between the country’s public service broadcasters that bundles their live television and on-demand services in one smart television application.
“Ireland will have to go into that space,” she says. “There’s some talk, but it’s not really a conversation that’s happening at the broadcaster level yet. And we need to be looking at where our audience is going to be, and how are we going to, not compete – because we’re never going to compete with the global streamers – but, how are we putting our content in a place that’s accessible?”
Ní Choistín has worn many hats throughout those 25 years at the broadcaster, that began shortly after she finished a degree in Irish and French in Trinity College Dublin. Most recently, she was head of news, but she’s done “nearly every role” at TG4, she says, and developed a “deep, very innate understanding of what we are, who we are and how we work”.
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After all, TG4 prides itself on its knowledge of its audience and the space it occupies within the broadcasting landscape. There is a quiet self-assuredness that comes with that awareness, a characteristic that has helped it to punch above its weight in the Irish market and, increasingly, on the international stage.
Its motto, Súil Eile [meaning “another perspective”], has been in place since TnaG’s 1996 launch, which Ní Choistín remembers fondly. Then a third-year student in Trinity, she helped organise a college launch party for the station through the university’s Cumann Gaelach. Trinity’s Central Societies Committee “gave us a bit of cash”, she recalls, and a hooley ensued in the Fleet bar across the road from the college.
“So, then we all thought we were going to get jobs,” says Ní Choistín. “This is great. We’re all going to work for TnaG. Of course, that didn’t really happen.” It wasn’t long before she would find her way to Baile na hAbhann, however.
Alan Esslemont, Ní Choistín’s predecessor, told The Irish Times in 2021 that the first iteration of the broadcaster hadn’t always lived up to the Súil Eile motto. “I always felt we just tried to be RTÉ One, but in the Irish language,” he said at the time, “and I thought we needed a different brand positioning.”
That process began in 1999 with the broadcaster’s relaunch as TG4, and Súil Eile has “been at the heart” of everything it has done since, Ní Choistín says. She credits the strength of the brand to the depth of its self-awareness and “confidence” in itself.
“We’re not mainstream,” she says.
“I think as well, being a publisher broadcaster, we’re innovative in how we work with producers. We’re looking for content that will resonate, that either gives a platform to underrepresented audiences or genres, but also that’s creative; that’s not something you’re going to see in English-language media. We have to kind of punch through that dominant English language media landscape.”
That occasionally means sticking your neck out.
“I think it was a brave choice to make a movie about Kneecap with all the controversy,” Ní Choistín says, with a wry chuckle. TG4 had a production credit on the Belfast rap group’s 2024 smash hit film. Ní Choistín says the broadcaster’s involvement in the production was “quite small”. But it was engaged in the scripting process, and its commissioning department gave feedback to the filmmakers about whether the picture would be “acceptable to an Irish language audience”.
Ní Choistín has zero regrets. “It really resonated,” she says, “as we know, with young audiences […] that this is something different.”
Between barnstorming festival performances, sell-out tours and the occasional trial on terror charges in the UK, a lot has happened since the film’s release. Kneecap’s flirtation with notoriety has fashioned the three boys from Belfast simultaneously into a target for right-wing Britain, an embarrassment for a swathe of official Ireland and a cause celebre for many young Irish people, particularly aspiring and actual Gaeilgeoirí.
Is the whiff of sulphur around Kneecap enough to deter any future collaborations with the group? Not really, says Ní Choistín.
“I think the short answer is yes [we would work with them again],” she says. “I think we have to be a bit bold as well. There are so many layers to this, but they resonate with younger audiences. And I don’t believe that if you commit to something once, you suddenly say: ‘No, we’re not going to work [with them] again because of what happened.’”
“Obviously, mistakes were made,” Ní Choistín concedes. “But yeah, we would work with them again. They do represent a cohort of young Irish speakers and they still appeal to them.”
The Kneecap lads have found fertile ground for their art in the current cultural climate. It’s clear that the Irish language is undergoing a remarkable revival at home and among the diaspora – a process in which TG4 has played an important role, says Ní Choistín.
When, as minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D Higgins initially funded the creation of TnaG, he “recognised that if we don’t do this, the Irish language will probably die”, she says. By the results alone, the broadcaster seems to have fulfilled its end of the bargain. It’s been a “contributing factor”, she says, to the fruitful conditions in which the language appears to be starting to flourish again.
There are other factors, however. “I’m in my late 40s,” says Ní Choistín.
“The whole thing of the way [the Irish language] was taught in school, every time anyone talks about it, Peig comes up. But there’s not that attitude or that kind of block with younger people towards the language. And they see things like Kneecap, which has really resonated. It’s kind of cooler, in a way, than it had been before.”
CV
Name: Deirdre Ní Choistín
Age: 48
Job: ard-stiúrthóir TG4, director general TG4
Lives: An Spidéal, Connemara
Family: Married to Breandán, they have four sons, Finian, Fiachra, Darach and Éanna, and Dougie the dog.
Something you might expect: She attended a Gaelscoil primary school and studied Irish and French at university, and is generally an early adopter of new technologies.
Something that might surprise: She didn’t have a television at home growing up.
