When RT╔ presenter John Creedon, takes calls live on air on The Health Show tomorrow night, he won't be doing so from a studio in Dublin. The station's new programme on health topics is broadcast weekly not from any major urban centre, but from the studios of Nemeton Productions in the Ring Gaeltacht, Co Waterford.
Since the early days of TG4 when it gave the nation Spanish football with commentaries in Irish - "agus c·l iontach ≤ Finidi George!" - Nemeton has been one of Ireland's most innovative independent broadcasters.
It has also grown, in a short time, into one of Ring's biggest enterprises, employing 25 full-time and about 25 part-time staff.
"I had intended to do a little bit of television now and again," says its founder and managing director, Irial Mac Murch·, "but television is an all-consuming animal. Once it gets a hold of you, it consumes you completely."
A native of Ring, Mac Murch· was a freelance journalist in the area, writing for newspapers including The Irish Times, before he began doing television work in the early 1990s.
He took on his first employee in 1995 and the company was up and running before the launch of Teilif∅s na Gaeilge, as TG4 was then, a year later.
From the beginning, Nemeton has effectively been the Irish language station's sports department. It has expanded the range of GAA matches shown live on television, from club county finals to national league inter-county games. On Sunday, it broadcast the women's All-Ireland football final from Croke Park.
It's an aspect of life with which Mac Murch· is intimately familiar. He is chairman of the Ring GAA club and a selector on the football team which shortly takes on Kilmacthomas in the Waterford intermediate final.
"We have five players and two selectors from the team employed here," he observes.
Its Monday night broadcasts of matches from Spain's Primera Liga, however, were Nemeton's first big commission. "I remember people telling us, 'don't do it, ye're mad'," says Mac Murch·. "but we got the contract from TG4 and we got the loans from the bank to set up an edit suite. It was a major breakthrough.
"We were showing highlights of Spanish football on TG4 at nine o'clock on Monday night, an hour before Eurosport and a full 24 hours before Sky Sports. We knew GAA would be natural for TG4, but this brought in an audience that wouldn't naturally tune in to the station."
Its ability to make and transmit its own programmes, not just produce the ideas, makes Nemeton different from most television production companies. It now has three edit suites, an outside broadcast unit, a studio, a graphics suite, and tomorrow it takes delivery of a mobile broadcast satellite unit, enabling it to broadcast live from anywhere in the State.
Most of the staff are from the area and the majority are also under 30. "One of the biggest problems we had initially was location," says Mac Murch·, "because people weren't willing to relocate to Ring. Gradually, we came up with a home-grown solution. We encouraged local people to go on training courses and to learn the skills necessary, and as a result two-thirds of the staff are locals."
The company's success means it now also attracts people from outside the area.
For Mac Murch·, it is the only place to live. "Being from the Gaeltacht is not just a physical thing; it's a mentality, it's a state of mind. There is something to do with us being Irish speakers that keeps attracting us back to where we were brought up."
