At 7 a.m. on Monday, an Irish television first will be heralded by a schmaltzy burst of saxophone and piano, a mix that has become the generic theme tune for breakfast television across the globe. A giant graphic of a sun will dazzle on our screens, and a girl and boy will hove into view.

"This is Ireland AM with all the news, sport and weather that you're waking up to," one of them will beam.

"Ya, boo, sucks," TV3 executives will try to resist yelling at their tardy contemporaries in RTE.

While critics are guaranteed to have a field day with the unashamedly middle-of-the-road ethos of Ireland AM, the station has managed to steal a march on the national broadcaster. With a live show each morning from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. they are adding 10 home-produced broadcasting hours to their weekly output and whatever RTE have for breakfast in the future (a rolling news service is rumoured to be starting soon) they will always be lagging behind.

Ireland AM is not going to surprise anyone who has ever watched breakfast TV. The most ground-breaking element of the show is the lack of a sofa. Instead it has blue armchairs in a set designed to look like a rather posh sitting room - all wood panelling and dried flowers, with a bowl of red apples resting on a trendy coffee table.

The show offers news, sport and weather at half-hourly intervals, with lots of lifestyle and consumer segments in between. The two main presenters are former model Amanda Byram and radio DJ Mark Cagney, neither of whom have any TV experience. Alan Hughes, who once presented the dreadful RTE gameshow Talkabout, doubles as weatherman and celebrity interviewer. Sinead Chaomhanach , yet another defection from TG4, will present live broadcasts from where ever anything is happening at that time of the morning. There will be a movie spot, a music segment and a weekly psychic called Rachel. For one item, Between The Sheets, various guests will discuss the newspapers they like to read in the morning.

Rick Hetherington, the station's MD and Philippe Brodur, the programme producer, trawled through hundreds of tapes of Breakfast TV models and picked the elements they felt worked best in an Irish format.

"People don't want to be challenged in the morning, they want to be comfortable," Hetherington explained.

"They don't want to have 10 minutes of East Timor over breakfast," added Brodur, who has six years experience at breakfast news at the BBC. The result is much more GMTV than The Big Breakfast, the wacky Channel 4 programme which Hetherington believes "wouldn't fit well with an Irish audience".

IT'S 5 a.m. at the TV3 studios in Tallaght and the two anchors of Ireland AM have just arrived at their desk, which is littered with vitamin C tablets, bananas, newspapers and cups of extra-strong coffee.

Amanda (26) looks healthier than anyone should at this time of the morning. Thirtysomething co-presenter Mark, who has worked on 2FM, 98FM and Today FM, busies himself, checking scripts and the running order for today's mock programme. Neither has had any television experience but this is their third week rehearsing "dry-runs". It gets easier all the time, they say.

Byram, hair wet, face free of make-up, says the most difficult thing about presenting is "just being yourself". Cagney has had problems getting used to all the technical constraints of television.

Getting up so early is proving difficult for Byram although she is grateful that it only takes her seven minutes to drive from her home in Castleknock. She has two alarm clocks strategically placed in her room. Cagney gets to the studio from Sutton in 29 minutes. He sets the alarm for 3.30 a.m. "so that I have enough time to perform my ablutions". He fell asleep over dinner the other night.

Brodur has a few surprises planned for his TV novices this morning. "We have to prepare them for everything, the auto-cue going down, guests not turning up, they are handling everything really well," he says.

At 5.45 a.m. Byram disappears into hair and make-up where she chats about the kind of image she will present on television.

"I'm not going for a Kelly Brook look," she says, explaining that instead of emulating the former Big Breakfast presenter and lingerie model, she will be aiming at "sophisticated sexy".

Cagney, meanwhile, will go for the I'm-formal-but-hey!-not-that-formal image with a tee-shirt under a suit jacket. He hates having to wear make-up for TV and self-deprecatingly refers to the early morning double-act as "Beauty and the Beast".

Andrew Hanlon, the Director of News at TV3 was the person who approached Byram for the job.

"We had interviewed around 200 people, many of them experienced broadcasters, and to be honest I didn't expect much from Amanda because she was a model. But she amazed us because she was so natural as a presenter," he says.

Byram is well aware of how she may be perceived by those who see her as just another bit of tellytotty.

"People have already said, `why did she get the job when she has no experience?' But I have been in front of a camera for most of my life and this is TV. It's not brain surgery," says Byram, who studied visual communications and photography before her successful foray into modelling.

"I am out to do a good job but whether or not I do there will be those who will still say I shouldn't have given up the day job."

As far as the heads of TV3 are concerned, Amanda and Mark will give Ireland AM all the personality the programme needs to attract viewers. Management are also encouraged by this country's "kitchen culture". Statistics show that eight per cent of televisions in Ireland are located in the kitchen, compared with one per cent in the UK. Moreover, Nielson audience monitoring figures reveal a 33 per cent increase in breakfast viewing in this country since 1996.

The programme has received heavy sponsorship from cereal makers Kelloggs and advertisers are healthily sceptical, while welcoming the new outlet to promote their clients' products.

This week, Channel 4 has been advertising The Big Breakfast on Irish radio, mindful that Ireland AM could eat into their ratings. TV3 - which has garnered an 8 per cent share of viewers in its first year - expect tiny audiences in the beginning and hope people will turn off the radio (namely, RTE's Morning Ireland) in favour of the first breakfast TV programme with 100 per cent Irish content.

Meanwhile, RTE is still refusing to comment publicly about its own breakfast plans, with a spokeswoman saying they may be ready to talk next week. A source confirmed that an early morning news, sport and business service is planned, adding union problems had caused delays.

"The view about breakfast TV in general is that we will do it if it costs us nothing . . . the station is more worried about becoming involved in bidding wars for programmes with TV3 than their breakfast project, to be honest," a source said.

With TV3's first birthday coming up on Monday, the station has organised a bash tonight for staff in the Landsdowne Road Rugby Club. The theme: Casino Night. And while it may be a gamble for the fledgling station to pump resources into a project that in the beginning, at least, will draw nominal audiences, they deserve credit just for blandly going where no Irish broadcaster has gone before.

It remains to be seen whether the nation thinks TV3's full Irish breakfast is worth getting up for.