That sound you hear is the long gurgle of a flagship sinking slowly. While RTE television quivers under the threat of increased competition from foreign TV giants, RTE Radio 1 is gradually losing its pre-eminence in a dozen or more small battles with local stations around the State, and it is also giving way to the pop enemy within, 2 FM.
Radio listening, like TV viewing, has become more pluralistic, with dial-spinning increasingly the norm and new stations still to come in Dublin and Cork.
Radio 1 remains easily the State's most popular station, and its key personalities boast audience figures which no one else approaches.
Marian Finucane, for example, got nearly 400,000 daily listeners in 1999 to her morning programme; however, she got about the same number of listeners in 1998 to Liveline, in a usually less popular afternoon slot.
Myles Dungan gets no good tidings to accompany the recent news of his imminent departure from the evening drive-time programme, Five Seven Live: the programme's audience has declined again.
Ironically, in spite of the Dungan v Dunphy hype, much of the listenership has apparently defected to 2 FM's Tony Fenton programme.
Eamon Dunphy's programme on Today FM, The Last Word, trails both RTE shows, but boasts a particularly strong hold on men aged 20 to 44, a "key demographic".
Indeed, Today FM will make much of the strength of the The Last Word in its drive-time battle with RTE.
However, the station chiefs may wish they had stuck with more of that serious, speech-based programming from the Radio Ireland days.
Today FM's listener-ship is largely stagnant, with a particularly miserable daytime market share in Co Dublin of only 5 per cent. Across the State, Today FM's "listened yesterday" figure is only 14 per cent.
Its daytime diet of pop music is not going down well with listeners, especially the crucial "housewives" category; its most interesting music programming, after 7 p.m., sees its market share at a respectable 8 per cent - but it trails Lyric FM in the capital during these hours.
They do things more quietly at Lyric FM, RTE's new classical music service, so it is likely the station's staff are quietly pleased.
The extraordinary figures published in August, covering the station's first two months, have not, however, been improved upon. In fact, the numbers suggest the station may have earned a number of "trial listeners" who have since returned to less lofty positions on the dial.
None the less, a 2 per cent market share for a station in such a minority niche is respectable.
Eamonn Lawlor's drive-time programme on Lyric, Into the Evening, attracts 42,000 listeners. Compare that with a far more widely publicised show, RTE Radio 1's Tonight with Vincent Browne - admittedly shorter and in a less popular time slot - which garners 47,000 listeners.
Moreover, more than three-quarters of Lawlor's listeners fall into the coveted ABC1 social-class category.
That's a remarkable figure, and definitely one to make advertisers take notice.