Channel4 Launch in Ireland

Channel4 launched on sky today occupying more 4's slot which now has moved beside it's sister channel More4 +1. Great news as I was extremely worried I'd lose it after the digital switchover.
Does this co-incide with channel4 opening offices in Belfast?

That is just what Ireland needs...Channel 4 can be really bad to recieve in some parts of the country. And depending on the weather, us in Dublin can sometimes have difficulty getting the station at all!!

Hopefully ITV will come onto the EPG [ Sky now advertises ITV as a channel but has a * beside it saying manual tuning may be required] and FIVE will launch aswell.

Thanks Sky News Ireland for that but isn't your name a bit defunct now it closed and all.....

If Ireland get ITV we shoudl get RTE1, TVG3! and the othere two

erm, look what happened to tara tv.

don;t tell me that people in balgedish get ITV aswell!

Won't there be a problem with rights with C4 being "officially" available?

Apparently C4 has changed its contracts with indies to give it full Irish rights to programmes produced for it, in order to prevent rights issues occouring. At the moment I can only think of Hollyoaks as a C4 programme being shown by an Irish network, anyway.

Besides, C4 has been available since launch day on cable here, though can't say the same for Channel 5 which is not available officially on any Irish platform.

I see your point, but I don't think we're missing much, there's some News and quite a few programmes on RTÉ in prime time, but otherwise the vast majority of programmes can be seen on British TV.

If you like the Irish News, you can see it on the Net, or if you want to gorp at RTÉ's (pretty decent) idents, then there are sites available.

Wasn't there a clause where Channel 5 had to be taken off-air on cable whenever Home and Away was on during the ITV -> Ch5 changeover?

What you are probably referring to here is NTL's blocking (still to this day AFAIK) of Home and Away on RTÉ TWO for Northern Ireland viewers only, due to rights issues. C5 isn't on any cable or other multichannel platform in ROI (apart from some terrestrial rebroadcast stations - the so-called "deflectors" - that operate in certain parts of rural Ireland).

Aparently, some C4 imported programmes are being blocked on Sky Ireland. This doesn't happen on cable, we get all C4 programming.

Yeah that was the case last night
Forget what was on, it was around 10pm...the screen was blue and had the "This Programme Is Not Available" caption up