Producing high-quality television for a national audience is a very expensive business. TG4, which is a public service broadcaster like RT╔, produces its daily schedules on a budget of about £20 million a year.

The station gets about £16 million from the Government. This is to be used only for producing Irish-language programming. It also gets 365 hours of programming a year from RT╔, free-of-charge, which costs RT╔ about £6 million a year.

The station also receives money from advertising and other commercial activities, but this amounts to less than £2 million a year.

Although it would like to be able to have all of its programmes in the Irish language, it costs so much to do this that it has to import programmes from the United States and other countries in order to fill its daily schedules. This has to be funded entirely by money from its own commercial revenues. Only about five or six hours of the TG4 schedule is in Irish.

It's popular twice-weekly soap opera, Ros Na R·n, costs £2.5 million a year. Put another way, it costs the same to make 35 hours of Ros Na R·n each year as it does to make five episodes of Coronation Street.

The Welsh-language channel S4C, which is similar in many ways to TG4, receives £90 million sterling a year from the British government, plus 550 hours of programming a year from BBC, free of charge, and the pick of the full Channel 4 schedule, also free of charge.