The Irish General Election

The Irish General Election has been called for three weeks time, I assume BBC Parliament will take RTÉs coverage as per last time.

TV3 News at 8:00 has been temporarily rebranded Vote 2016 Special (though with no obvious difference in format) for the duration of the campaign. Alan Cantwell seems to have returned to present.

Alan returned to TV3 last October to present the News at 8 after a brief stint at UTV Ireland.

Meanwhile we are two debates into the campaign. The first, last Thursday on TV3 and featuring the four main party leaders, was (in an unorthodox move) dual moderated by Pat Kenny and Collete Fitzpatrick, neither of whom could keep the four leaders from talking over each other for large chunks of time. The bigger seven way debate on RTE last night, was anchored by Clare Byrne who ran it with a much tougher attitude, though it still ran over its slot for 30 minutes - not sure if the scheduled post debate programme aired at that point. A scheduled Irish language debate on TG4 has reportedly been cancelled, leaving one more debate on RTE before polling day.

UTV Ireland not getting a debate?

Apparently not. The last debate, a four way, is on Tuesday at 9:30pm on RTE One.

RTE News is providing live election results coverage on RTE1 from 10am Saturday 27th February, to 3am Sunday. That's 17 hours of coverage, with only interuptions for the One, Nuacht, Six and Nine bulletins. There's also extra coverage on Sunday from 11am to 3.10pm.

TV3 is very poor. Other than maybe some coverage in Saturday AM and Sunday AM, the only marked election coverage is on Sunday evening from 7pm to 9pm. Poor show from TV3.

UTV Ireland isn't much better. They have Ireland Live Election Specials at 5.30pm and 8.30pm each for 30 minutes. Nothing else.

Whether Sky News will do much coverage, we have yet to hear, but I don't think they've ever bothered to do much in the way of coverage before.

TV3 did have coverage listed in some advanced listings but it is gone now. It's an extremely poor show and it won't endear it with politicians - it has just single handedly made the case for the licence fee. Two hours of coverage 46 hours after the polls close simply isn't good enough.

Yeah, it's a real shame, as their regular news coverage isn't too bad, at least on weekdays. Their programmes at 12.30, 5.30 and 8pm are pretty distinctive compared to RTE and indeed, any UK broadcasters. What a shame that Tonight with Vincent Browne is so boring. I would have looked to cut him back to once a week, and bring back the old Nightly News at 11pm.

But this is a poor show, especially as the election was known to be upcoming long before the date was actually finalised.

Reading between the lines it would seem that part of the reason of the truncated TV3 coverage is Browne's unavailability for health reasons. I am not sure why Alan Cantwell or Collete Fitzpatrick couldn't anchor instead though.

That makes no sense because Browne won't be around forever.

I think it's more to do with TV3 itself at this stage. The new owners are getting rid of the failed management staff and at the same time are probably trying to work out a new way forward for the station. It's almost certain that the station is going to have some sort of relaunch in the next few months as the old ways weren't working. The new owners have started to buy up sports coverage and probably don't know themselves what their news output is going to be in the weeks and months ahead. Remember that the TV3 News operation isn't probably in a position to cover an election count properly as resources have been cut back for years. Until the last 6 months it's newsroom only seems to operate 4 and a half days a week.