RTE's Election Night coverage on BBC Parliament

From 19.00 Friday 25th May.

Good to see they're getting pretty serious about doing this sort of thing.

Looking way way ahead... I'm guessing we can look forward to coverage of the 2008 American Presidential elections from one of the US channels.

Who's your money on? ABC?

Would have probs with the commercial breaks. Will probably take C-Span.

[quote="stuartfanning"]

C-Span doesn't really have standard election night coverage to speak of; it usually has an in-studio discussion instead. The channel's forte is raw, largely unedited coverage of the campaigns and the issues. The BBC might carry PBS's coverage, which is also focused more on analysis rathen than current results, or one of the commercial networks, which provide standard election night coverage. Ad breaks are relatively few and far between on election night and they can easily be covered up with, say, promos for BBC programming.

According to the BBC listings, the coverage will only go on till about half 9.

Im quite suprised that the BBC is doing this. Have they done so in the past with Irish elections?
Its funny how RTE and even TG4 will have election coverage on Friday night, yet TV3 wont

If the BBC were to take one of the US Networks' coverage, presumably they would take a clean feed (the one distributed to affiliates), which would be minus commercials wouldn't it?

This is an interesting and rather unique opportunity for UK viewers to see RTÉ's non-news output first hand. I imagine the production values should be good.

Speaking of international elections, how often do they do them/for whom? Clearly Ireland is a close neighbour and France is a fairly major country with regard to international affairs (SBS did the same as BBC Parliament for that, in the early hours of Monday morning, Australian time).

I'm fairly sure the ABC makes it's election programming available for other broadcasters - for the 2004 Australian election TVNZ had much of the ABC's coverage, so I'd be curious to see if they do show it - there's an election scheduled later this year and considering the number of young, drunk, Australians in London..

TV3 has been foreign owned throughout its history and has almost no local programming apart from the news and its Ireland AM breakfast show. Its about as Irish as Green dyed beer in Boston on St Patrick's day. Little wonder it shows no interest in the election.

Looking at the preview of the coverage on tonight's bulletins, I think we're in for a rare treat from RTÉ. They'll have OBUs at all 43 count centres across the country. Domestically and via the web, they'll have full coverage on two television channels, two radio channels, on the web, Aertel and via SMS.

Nice to see BBC Parliament simulcasting events. Although they're only showing two and a half hours of coverage there, I expect that the Beeb will be drawing on RTÉ's resources throughout the day.

Coverage on RTÉ One television and http://www.rte.ie/live begins at 11am and continues until 1:40. It picks up again at 2:20pm and will continue until the early hours. Let's hope it all looks good!

I would imagine given the magnitude of the US elections, the BBC will anchor their own programme from Washington, dipping into ABC coverage as required for interviews etc.

There is obviously little value for the licence fee payer in putting this amount of resources into the Irish election.

Should point out that its an "election results day" rather than election night - the only time in recent memory (ever?) there has been any results counted on the actual election night (ie, tonight!) was back in 2002 when three constituencies had electronic voting, and there was an election night programme to cover those! This time around we are back to all paper-and-pencil voting and so no counts will begin until 9am tommorow. Tallies (unofficial counts done by parties) should be available on RTÉ Aertel and RTÉ.ie by mid-morning with first declarations from late lunchtime onwards. As we use PR-STV it takes a lot longer to count Irish elections than UK ones, however most counts should be complete by late tommorow night with the remainder by Saturday lunchtime.