"What's the password?" asks the Irish Times photographer of the man who's knocking on the door.
"DCTV is broke," says the man and laughs. It's Ciaran Moore, station manager at Dublin Community Television.
At the Fishamble Street end of Temple Bar there’s a small studio space and editing suite with a big window and a suite of cameras. DCTV also has offices in the Guinness Enterprise Centre off Thomas Street, but these are being vacated on the day I visit.
This month, after being notified that none of its projects would receive funding in the latest Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) round of funding, DCTV announced it would have to cease broadcasting.
"Five full-time staff lost their jobs," says training and events co-ordinator Barry Lennon, one of those five.
The station will continue to air until February as they complete projects and investigate alternative funding options. "It's an orderly wind-down," says Susan Jackson, who is editing a volunteer-produced programme called CityWide on a laptop.
A volunteer and co-ordinator of the programme, she recently went to Poznan in Poland to film the Homeless World Cup.
If you have stumbled across DCTV while channel-surfing the high numbers on UPC (it's at 802), you might have been baffled by the diversity of its programming: music shows (such as Community of Independents or the traditional music programme Coppers and Brass), community-focused documentaries, reportage, adult-literacy programming, storytelling, theatre, Portuguese-language shows for the Brazilian community, and wittily anarchic howls of rage such as Dole TV (items such as "C*** of the Week" probably wouldn't get past RTÉ's editors).
Television by the people
From the start it was all about television by the people and for the people. Jackson, a former care worker, says that at DCTV, "people could come in off the street and find themselves making programmes a day later".
Anyone who wished could come in with an idea, learn how to film, present or edit and ultimately get something on the air.
Big audiences were never on the agenda. "At six on a Saturday, prime-time viewing, we had a Romanian-language show," says Moore. "We put that up against X-Factor. There are 20,000 Romanian-speakers in Ireland.
"On Wednesday at five we have a mass audience in Drimnagh. "
That's the time they run Bosco Talks, a magazine programme created by young people as part of a training programme at St John of Bosco Youth Centre in Drimnagh. It's all part of the ethos here. People make programmes about their own communities and their own interests.
Since 2006 DCTV has created a huge body of work (Jackson says there are more than 400 instalments of CityWide alone), much of it online on sites such as Vimeo, and most of it representing a very different slant on the last seven years of Irish cultural, social and political life. It's about representation, says Moore.
"One of the lads went out and did a project called Dublin Diaries, where he went out to a different centre every day and got people to read a script about social history," he says.
“What was interesting was that all the young people said, ‘I sound like a junkie’, and all the older people said, ‘I sound really common’. And that’s because they never hear their own accents on TV.”
Funding problem
The problem for DCTV is that there was never a specific fund for community television. Instead they were financed by the BAI on a project-by-project basis.
“We became a very successful production house that also ran a television station,” says Moore.
That arrangement was never ideal, and this year they haven’t received enough money to continue.
Ciaran Murray, the station's chairman, believes DCTV's absence will be felt. "There should be a space for minority voices and minority views and things that don't usually get on television."
Lennon says one of his own highlights of the past few years was seeing a young girl from Drimnagh holding her own beside Labour TD Michael Conaghan and Sinn Féin TD Aengus Ó Snodaigh during a debate on the fiscal treaty.
He's also pleased with a recent episode of Community of Independents in which they draped a borrowed python around the presenter's shoulders and had him play a ukulele version of Britney Spears's I'm a Slave 4 U.
Moore fondly recalls another show . "When we were building the previous studio, the first thing we filmed there was a men's support group, Men Alone in No-Man's Land. The studio wasn't finished, but they insisted on coming in anyway. We dragged in two couches.
"It was a strange group – long-term unemployed men, fairly wizened Dubliners in their 40s and 50s who were finding themselves and getting into all these new-age treatments. There they were in a building site, tapping their heads to bring out their inner chi. I remember thinking, 'this is not afternoon telly, nowhere else will broadcast this'."
