IT'S a little-known fact, but more people are watching RTE television news each week in the United States than in Ireland. This achievement is courtesy of a company known as Out Of Ireland Television, the brainchild of a journalist, Patricia O'Reilly, from Clondalkin in Dublin and Bill Huber, an advertising executive from California.
Their television company, based in New York, puts out a half hour programme of Irish news, sports and features each week to 30 million households across the United States and Canada. The audience is an estimated 3.5 million, and potentially much more. Some 40 million Americans claim Irish ancestry.
Launched in October 1993, the company recently concluded an agreement with the third largest public broadcasting system company in the US, WLIW Channel 21, which opens up even more television stations to the programme. And just last month, it linked up with the Irish Voice newspaper and Irish America magazine to develop programme ideas.
But it wasn't always thus. O'Reilly and Huber remember the early days when the pace was frenetic, the workload impossible, and 18 hour working days the norm. Huber says: "If there's a mistake we didn't make at first, I'm not aware of it."
O'Reilly says: "What Irish interest Americans got on television was usually around St Patrick's Day, beer scenes, green hats and parades, or else it was a bomb going off in Belfast. We wanted to change that image and present the new, young dynamic Ireland. Bring something fresh and new to Irish American television."
Going out on the public broadcasting system had the advantage that the programme would go free into people's homes. But there are restrictions on advertising, or "sponsoring" as it is known in the US. And it is through "sponsoring" that Out Of Ireland makes its money.
The programme's first sponsors had no connection with Ireland at all. They were a Japanese beer company called Kirin and a Jewish owned printing company called Zarett. Huber says he likes to think they got the sponsorship because of his sales abilities, but admits it probably had more to do with a scoop O'Reilly pulled off when she managed an interview with the singer Sinead O'Connor.
It was the first television interview the singer had given since she made international headlines for tearing up a picture of the Pope on NBC's Saturday Night Live. O'Reilly's interview with O'Connor made news itself and was picked up by Newsdoy, the New York Daily News and radio and television stations throughout the United States.
And as the programme's audience share grows rapidly, the list of sponsors has developed to include Aer Lingus, Bord Failte, Chemical Bank, Mutual of America, the American Ireland Fund and Claddagh Jewellery.
O'Reilly is aware from phone calls and postbag that the programme is reaching more than just Irish Americans. She says there has been a tremendous growth of interest in the US about Irish affairs because of the ongoing peace process and the emergence of popular Irish artists and writers like Maeve Binchy, Roddy Doyle, U2 and The Cranberries.
O'Reilly says she has had an overwhelming response recently from programme directors. And these are the people who buy in programmes.
Meanwhile, Out of Ireland Television is itself making news in the United States. O'Reilly was interviewed on CNN about the murder of Veronica Guerin, having interviewed the journalist shortly before she was killed. And a package the programme put out about the Drumcree stand off was shown to the House of Representatives last week.
O'Reilly wants to see the programme reaching every household in the US. The way they're going that should happen soon.
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