RTÉ boxes clever with Irish language television series

FORMER WORLD boxing champion Bernard Dunne is spending part of his retirement promoting the Irish language via a six-part television series called The Bród Club, which debuts on RTÉ One next Monday at 7.30pm.

The show, which features Dunne touring Ireland encouraging people “to give Irish a go again”, has harnessed the resources of various personalities for a “tease-and-reveal” publicity campaign as part of its “national call to action” to show pride (bród) in the Irish language. The show, which aims to get 100,000 people to commit “to use what [Irish] you have”, is produced for RTÉ by Conor Moloney of Independent Pictures, which received €320,000 licence fee funding from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s Sound and Vision fund to make the show. The other main funding partners are RTÉ and Foras na Gaeilge.

In order to preserve the immediacy of the campaign, each programme will be filmed and edited in the week before it is broadcast, says Moloney. “We would feel there is a huge constituency out there who have the language, but need a kick up the behind,” he says. That “kick up the behind” will largely be stunt-based, with the premise of the show revolving around “guerrilla tactics”, he says, citing a Dublin Gospel Choir “flash mob” in the first show.

The reigning Mr World, Limerick man Kamal Ibrahim, will take part in a six-week billboard campaign “to show his naked pride in the language”, according to Moloney, while the agency Refresh is managing the social media element of the promotion.

People who sign up to join Dunne’s “club” will be required to register with RTÉ ID, allowing the broadcaster to begin amassing a potentially valuable subscriber network. If viewers sign in via their Facebook or Twitter accounts, this gives the broadcaster access to their public profile data. The Bród Club is the first programme to invite viewers to sign up to RTÉ ID, after the broadcaster sought consumer feedback on the service last year.

The Bród Club campaign follows the launch earlier this week of Abairleat.com, a separate social media venture aimed at both learners and speakers of Irish, which currently has 1,200 users and aims to amass 15,000 by the end of 2015.