(1978) outlines the historical and sociological background of Ireland to place the progress of its broadcasting service in the context of its post-independence development. It analyses the difficulties of running public service broadcasting financed by both licence fee and advertising, and competing in half its television reception area with two of the premier broadcasting systems in the world. With regular broadcasting beginning with Independence, its development was inevitably bound up with the process of building the political, economic and social framework of the new State, and this book closely examines how the Irish broadcasting system coped with the attending economic, cultural and political difficulties.