On Monday evening, John Caden stepped into the upmarket Commons restaurant in Dublin for an important business meeting. It lasted several hours, and by the time dessert had arrived the former controller of programmes at Radio Ireland had, in his own mind at least, brought to an end his stormy relationship with the six-month-old station.
As he and his fellow diners talked, Caden's worst fears were confirmed. John Revell and Geoff Holland, from the UK company Ginger Productions, had been called in as consultants to boost ratings on the station. The men responsible for Don't Forget Your Toothbrush and Chris Evans's hugely popular breakfast show on BBC's Radio 1, had definite ideas about where the station should go. "They were talking about how in the UK there are housewives who spend their time switching from one middle-of-the-road music radio station to the next. They clearly thought Radio Ireland should capture this market." As the night wore on, Caden says he realised that there was nothing left to talk about. When he handed in his resignation the following morning to Radio Ireland's Chief Executive, Dick Hill, it was more in disappointment than in anger. "I thought there was a great opportunity there for this station to be at the cutting edge of social discussion, of entertainment - a station with a sense of humour to take us into the next century. As far I was concerned, there was a strong aspiration for Radio Ireland to broadcast quality and, importantly, commercial radio," he says.
Soon after he left RTE to join the station, Caden became aware that this aspiration was not shared across the Radio Ireland board. "A certain type of radio station was pitched to the IRTC at the time. But that is not what the station subsequently became." His assessment of the events leading to his resignation is summarised by the following assertion put to him recently by a former colleague: " `You had a group of people who set up the station, who had made their millions, who were very wealthy now and to them running Radio Ireland was like running their own toy train set.' There is an awful lot to that," he says.
Caden's experience in radio is considerable. He began his career in the accounts department of RTE more than 20 years ago but soon moved to a post as a researcher, and later became the producer of the Gay Byrne Show. The programme had 400,000 listeners when Caden took over. He brought the figure to 750,000. E on a number of current affairs shows. The move to Radio Ireland came at a time when Caden was looking for a new challenge. The alarm bells started ringing when he discovered there were no plans to market the station. "I thought this was extraordinary and would ask about it. I was told it was because we hadn't got the product right," he says. "So what were we doing on air?"
As the station came in for criticism, first for the unceremonious sacking of several staff members and later for dismal listenership figures which suggested that fewer than 2 per cent of the population were tuning in, massive research was undertaken. Caden believed the problems could be solved by restructuring the programme schedule. His idea was to have presenters Paddy Murray and Liam Mackey hosting a lively, humorous breakfast programme with 20 minutes of news items. Emily O'Reilly was to move from the morning to the lunchtime slot, a slot Caden believed was more suited to hard news. The Last Word, with Eamon Dunphy, was to be shortened and given more focus.
For its part, the official Radio Ireland research churned out a concept which worried John Caden. "SMAC radio," he explains. "It stands for Soft Mainstream Adult Contemporary radio." Caden remembers a smart young marketing executive waving his hands around and saying "what we want are the middle-aged housewives living in some borough like Fingal". These over35 housewives were to be fed a diet of Bryan Adams and the Bee Gees. According to Caden, SMAC was viewed as "opiate for the housewives", a "grossly flawed" tactic he feels would ultimately lead to "commercial suicide".
"In this way they are trying to capture a niche market of - when you look at the recent JLNR figures - an audience which represents less than 6,000 listeners at peak listening time. This seems illogical when you think that at one stage Cliona Ni Bhuachalla's programme was getting 9,000 listeners. Revell and Holland want to compete with FM104 and 98FM when Radio Ireland should be aiming to take audiences away from the local stations and RTE.
"There is a split, much like that in political parties, on the Radio Ireland board," he maintains. "There are those who favour the original plan and those to whom the word eclectic means little more than an electric cattle prod." He says that the latter group appears to hold much more sway at the moment but hopes that things will work out. "It is strange not having to go to work for the first time in 30 years," he smiles. "But my family and former colleagues are being very supportive. All in all I'm being pretty philosophical about the whole thing," he says.