TV3's main news bulletins are attracting as few as 24,000 viewers. The latest A.C. Nielsen ratings for television news programmes suggest that TV3's News @ 7, which is broadcast each weekday evening, gets an average of 29,000 viewers, falling to 24,000 on Thursdays.
The figures compare with an average audience of 397,000 for the Six One news on RTE 1 an hour earlier.
The half-hour News @ 7 programme faces stiff competition from RTE's Irish-made soap Fair City, which goes out in the same time slot three days a week and is one of the most popular programmes. News @ 7 also suffers from the fact that it follows RTE's 6 p.m. bulletin and TV3's own First Edition bulletin, which is broadcast at 5.30 p.m.
TV3's late-afternoon news, First Edition, is performing significantly better, attracting an average of 73,000 viewers each day. The station's News Tonight is drawing an average audience of 67,000 in its 10.45 p.m. slot. RTE Network 2's News 2, which is aimed at young adults and goes out at a similar time, has an average audience of over 150,000.
TV3's news output came in for heavy criticism when the station went on air in September 1998. Television reviewers criticised it as lightweight.
TV3's Head of News, Mr Andrew O'Hanlon, said the 7 p.m. news had faced intense competition, but its audience was growing.
"The 5.30 news bulletin is doing very well, but News @ 7 is a slower longer-burning project," he said.
Mr O'Hanlon said the station was also at a disadvantage when it came to news because of the £70 million in revenue RTE gets each year in television licence fees.
TV3 has recently invested heavily in extra news broadcasts for its breakfast programming, which the station says is outperforming its British rivals.
The most popular news bulletin on any Irish station remains RTE 1's Nine O'Clock News, which got an average 481,000 viewers each day in April, peaking at an average 520,000 on Fridays.
Meanwhile, provisional figures for the first week of May suggest that the episode of Glenroe during which one of the main characters died in a car crash attracted 775,000 adult viewers.
