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(This article is produced by our Gaeltacht team. You can read an English version of this piece here)
NOT EVEN A year into her role as Director General at TG4, Deirdre Ní Choistín has a lot of goals. And she has already achieved many of them.
Ní Choistín started working with the station shortly after graduating from Trinity College in the ’90s and who has worked in many jobs in Baile na hAbhann (the location for the TG4 headquarters in Conamara) since. She was appointed as the TG4 director general in April of last year, after spending a number of years as the head of news with the station.
Among the Kildare woman’s ambitions are to see an Irish language film to win an Oscar.
She’d also like there to be an Irish language entertainment show that draws audiences to the station like Traitors and Love Island do on other channels, and she would like the station to have an online news service by the time TG4 celebrates its 30th birthday at Halloween.
As the proverb says, twenty years a-growing, twenty years in bloom. In recent weeks, it has been announced that TG4’s audience is also growing. The station had an average audience share of 2.3% last year, the fifth consecutive year that this has increased.
More than 77.2% of the Irish population watched the channel at some time in 2025. In addition, the channel is celebrating ten nominations for the IFTA Awards this year. The film Aontas received six nominations, including a nomination for best film. In this category, the film is competing against Saipan and Blue Moon. Báite received four nominations.
Only a few years have passed since another film supported by TG4, An Cailín Ciúin, was on the shortlist for an Oscar. The film directed by Colm Bairéad and produced by Cleona Ní Chrualaoi, married to Colm, was on the shortlist for best international feature film (that isn’t in English).
The film that won the award was All Quiet On The Western Front, a film that was also nominated for best film that year.
Back in 2017 when Alan Esslemont, Ní Choistín’s predecessor at TG4, established the Cine 4 scheme, a scheme that focuses on supporting producing films in Irish that receive funding from TG4, Screen Ireland and Coimisiún na Meán, his vision was that a film from the scheme would win an Oscar.
“It was an achievement that ‘An Cailín Ciúin’ was in the running, which was produced on a very low budget in comparison to the other films in this category, so our aim is to produce high standard films that are entertaining and engaging for the audience,” Ní Choistín said.
“We’d love to win an Oscar and we want that to happen,” she said, explaining that nine films have been produced under this scheme to date and that the tenth would be ready in 2027.
Although people are focused on the Oscar awards, especially at this time of year, there’s a great deal more on TG4’s Director General’s agenda.
She was the executive Molscéal for Gaeltacht and Irish language communities throughout Ireland. Another TG4 online service, Bloc, is aimed at providing content for audiences in their teens and twenties. This is one part of TG4’s effort to engage a wider audience, especially younger people who don’t watch TV in the same way that their parents do.
She is at the helm station during an ongoing revolution in TV viewing patterns. The era of linear TV has passed. Now you, the viewer, can watch what you like as much as you like when you like.
That era also was when you had to get a separate aerial for TG4 rather than the aerial needed for RTÉ. It was even more difficult to access the channel in the North. “We’re in the era of choice and the audience can choose what they want to watch, I suppose the audience is in charge or has the upper hand,” she said.
“When TnaG (‘Teilifís na Gaeilge’ as TG4 was previously called) started, the broadcasters, if you like, had the upper hand, we established a schedule, we ran it and the audience was able to sit down and watch but they only had the choice to switch from one channel to another.”
Now Ní Choistín understands that the culture has changed and she and the broadcaster are trying to deal with an audience that are paying for streaming services, families with one streaming account or more in their home.
“On behalf of TG4 as a public service broadcaster, we have to deal with this and understand the audience’s mindset when they are watching content and what the watching patterns are now regarding the era of choice.”
The TG4 player is very busy with a lot of content available for viewers, wherever they are, including livestreams, soaps, entertainment programs and the TG4 flagship, of course, Ros na Rún.
“Something that we’ve noticed, for example, is that there is a lot of demand for Ros na Rún on the player and we will see from the viewer figures that we get on the player that a lot of people use it to watch Ros na Rún,” she said, noting that episodes of Ros na Rún are broadcasted twice a week on the TV, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and these are released on the player the day before.
We intend to do this with the well-known series, Laochra Gael, this year and the weekly episode will be available on the player the same day it comes out on TV.
Another series receiving traction from the audience is Crá, a detective series set in rural Donegal, perhaps the first series of its kind made in Ireland. Its first season was a great success and production of the second series is already underway.
With TG4 approaching 30 years on the air, Ní Choistín has revealed that the broadcaster will have an independent online news service by the time it celebrates its significant birthday at Halloween.
TG4 currently receives its news service from RTÉ as part of an arrangement, that was laid out in the legislation when TG4 (previously TnaG) was established that the national
broadcaster would provide an hour’s worth of content of shows per day for the Irish language channel. Included in that hour is a half-hour news programme that is broadcasted every day at 7pm.
There has been increased talk that TG4 would have a news service independent from RTÉ for a while now, especially since the Government accepted recommendations in the
Report of the Future of Media that was published in 2022, one of which was that TG4 would have an independent news service. Another was that a separate report be made on Irish language media.
There are some steps that have been taken by TG4 and there are some still to be taken in regards to establishing an independent news service. The news service for young people,
‘Nuacht Cúla 4’, has been on the air since September 2023 and that news service is being provided for TG4 by a Conamara company, Fibín, that has its headquarters and studio next door to TG4 headquarters in Baile na hAbhann
Something that is missing, however, is an online news service or, more correctly, a multi-platform news service, and Ní Choistín understands that TG4 needs something like this urgently.
“We commissioned research about this in 2021 – the University of Galway and Red C conducted the research and it was remarkably shown that 79% of the Irish language community wanted online news at that time and this surprised the Irish language community and journalists as people didn’t understand that was the case,” she said.
Radio news was in second place and TV news in third place – TG4 has work to do in regards to providing a service that the audience wants.
Ní Choistín intends for the new service to be live in 2026. She certainly has a specific goal.
“Our goal is that we will start an online news service, that it will be connected to the TV service ‘Nuacht TG4’ but we will develop a seven-day service that will be available for the
audience wherever they look for their news first and that is online.
We will be on the air for thirty years at Halloween this year and we hope that the multi-platform online news service will commence around this time too.”
An ambitious goal but TG4 was once a dream, and it’s appropriate that the station will always be hopeful. The most surprising thing about the interview was that we succeeded to spend more than half an hour talking without funding, the most urgent issue the Irish language broadcaster has had for many years, once mentioned.
That’s a story for another day!
The Journal’s Gaeltacht initiative is supported by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme
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