SEVEN YEAR OLD Ailbhe Ni Chomhail is sitting up straight on a tall chair in a dubbing studio in Spiddal. She is looking intently at a monitor beside her which shows a scene from a French Canadian adventure story called L'enfant des neiges.

It's a wilderness trek full of bears and forests and right now a little girl is clinging tightly to her mother as they try to cross a wild, racing river on horseback.

Director Stiofan Seoighe gives the cue as the icy river surges up around her thighs. "Ah . . . Elle est froide," says the little girl. "Uuu . . . Ta se fuar," says Ailbhe.

Two miles away Deirbhile Ni Churraighin is sitting on the set for a 10 minute pre school series called Boisini. Time for a story and she settles back in her chair, framed by cutsey cheesecloth curtains and a trendylooking puppet wearing a multicoloured caipin.

"An samhradh a bhi ann agus bhi na feirmeoiri ag lomadh a gcuid caorach," she tells the camera in a bright, nursery tale voice. But there's a problem and producer Maire Ni Chonlain stops the shoot. Minutes later the floor manager, Patricia Deegan, gestures to the first TV camerawoman Tory Island has produced, Frances Nic Ruaidhri.

"An feidir linn dul ar solas dearg aris?" she says.

Next door Michael Lally, late of RTE and now head of news for Teilifis na Gaeilge, is talking to some of the 18 trainee news journalists about their assignments for the day. One of them has chosen drugs in Galway as his topic, and plans to illustrate it with silhouette shots of people smoking hash in a well known pub.

It's not going 10 be an easy one to get in the can, but at least he's ambitious. The buzz word among the trainees is "daon-treoraithe", a new coinage used to describe the "people centred" approach TnaG will take to its news.

About seven miles west, in Baile na hAbhann, stonemasons are shaping stone with hammer and cold chisel, the clunk of their blows carrying through the Connemara air. The headquarters for the new station is all but finished and miles of cable snake through under floor ducting, ready to be connected to the computers in TnaG's technological heart.

Back in Spiddal there is more building going on, the two storey set cum studio for the stat ion's flagship soap opera, Ros na Run. It will be made by two independent production companies working together, a dual approach that TnaG has used in other areas, in an effort to combine experience and energy.

The purpose built studio will be the envy of those who work on Glenroe or Fair City, the exterior set for the "village" is built around an inner core where the inside shots take place. Simple, really, but apparently too revolutionary to happen in Donnybrook.

With just over two months to Tnag's launch, the lunchtime crowd in Spiddal is a jostle of tourists and television people, murmuring voices mixing the new jargon with the cheerful exclamations of Italians.

The station goes on air at Samhain, the Celtic festival at Hallowe'en, when dreams and visions mingle with the everyday. Already the tension is building and some of those involved are praying for that ancient magic to help their dreams become reality.

OVER 120 hours of original programming have been commissioned from at least 35 independent producers scattered around the country, creating at least 200 jobs; another 70 people will be employed on the soap opera which is due to start shooting next month. A further 70 hours of programming in various languages have been dubbed into Irish, creating part time work for about 70 actors and technicians.

Most of the station's core staff of 30 has been recruited, in line with a business plan prepared by Coopers & Lybrand. This does not include the news journalists, who will be employed by RTE, TnaG's "mother" station.

Contrary to earlier fears that the project would be hijacked by RTE and develop a Dublin centred ethos, TnaG's senior management has moved west to Connemara and has already established a fair degree of autonomy.

Telegael, the independent production house in Spiddal which hires out its facilities to programme makers as well as undertaking dubbing work, is bursting at the seams. An extension added to the existing building last year is already too small for its needs.

Most of the company's staff of 35 are in their 20s and about half of the sound technicians, camera people and editors are women. It is an age and gender profile which runs right through the audio visual industry created by Udaras na Gaeltachta in the west since the late 1980s.

At that time the Udaras gambled on the possibility of TnaG and won its investment created a thriving cottage industry which gave jobs to lots of young people who would otherwise have migrated to Dublin or headed down the N18 to Shannon.

Instead, some of the traffic has gone the other way. Micheal O Cathain at his Foreign Affairs posting in Australia to come home to a job in Telegael. TnaG's new technical manager, Neil Keaveney, comes from Killiney in Dublin. He learned his trade on state of the art digital equipment at Fox TV in Arizona and is now learning to say "digiteach" in Connemara.

Others include Maire Eilis Ni Fhlaithearta, who has just completed a post graduate course in communications in UCG and has landed a job in her native Spiddal acting in Ros a Run. And Kate Verling from Limerick, who has recovered her childhood `blas' since she arrived in Spiddal last year to work as facilities manager with Telegael.

At one level the station is happening at a good time: the revival in Irish has coincided with an end of millennium curiosity about roots, and there is a groundswell of goodwill towards the station - despite all the adverse media comment - which TnaG is tapping into.

Christy King from Gaelmedia, one of the independent companies based in the west, has any number of anecdotes which indicate this goodwill. There is the one about the actor and the pilot programme. "Ray McBride drove down from Derry after finishing on stage at 10 p.m. He arrived at four in the morning, came out and did the gig with us and drove back to Derry to be on stage that night," he says.

BUT it also faces a hostile broadcasting environment in which Sky TV is king the finger is on the zapper and viewers may soon have 500 channels to chose from, according to the Green Paper on Broadcasting. What hope is there for a small, underfunded station broadcasting in a language spoken by only a small percentage of the population on an island on the edge of Europe?

It is a scenario which has led film maker Muiris Mac Conghail to claim the station is doomed from day one. With around three hours airtime a day - and a two hour gap between the first hour (aimed at children) and the other two - he argues that it will not make much of an impact.

Against that background, it is clear TnaG is going to make a determined effort to grab as big a share of the potential audience as possible (estimates vary from 120,000 to an outside maximum of 500,000).

Its programming will have optional subtitles to make it accessible to those with little Irish; there is a big emphasis on programming with a strong visual content, and its news will be decidedly populist in tone.

It will treat major news stories differently to RTE, says Michael Lally. "The kind of barometer I have is: I think of my local pub in Galway, Murphy's pub. I watch the lads in there when the nine o' clock news comes on and I look at what interests them, and I see when they go back to their pints."

But the search for popularity carries with it the seeds of an identity crisis. Earlier rows over funding have restricted TnaG's freedom to experiment. It is now hyper conscious of the need to show it is not wasting money. Some Gaeltacht producers argue that the commissioning editors have become cautious and conservative as a result.

In its anxiety to avoid commissioning any "clangers", which could be seized on with glee by the station's opponents, TnaG may forget to ask itself some fundamental questions. What yardstick will it use to judge success or failure? Who is it for?

Some of the most important work TnaG is doing is also the most open to attack from critics. It is nurturing young companies set up by people who do not yet have much experience, hoping, that their somewhat uneven output will be masked by a successful soap and one or two prestige offerings.

TnaG may be forced to play the numbers game, but the parents in Carraroe or Palmerstown who are trying to raise their kids through Irish will care little if the TAM ratings reach 400,000.

Their primary concern will be that it should broadcast enough cartoons and play school programmes to make the telly an ally and not an enemy of their cause. Anything else is a bonus and lies in the realm of language rights and pluralism.