Lorelei Harris

Producer and documentary-maker

The audience as a unitary thing passed here by the end of the 1980s; there is no longer a group of people sitting around a wireless. Radio in Ireland has been hugely important in the formation of national identity. The model in a postcolonial state sees the idea of radio being a constant dialogue between you and a mythical audience. There is still clearly a demand for that, a need in this hugely articulate society for those forms of discourse to continue.

My personal view is different: radio provides a space where one can write, using sound as the medium. At the end of the day, there is only one listener - listening being a fundamentally individual activity - and the notion of "audience" is simply a multiplication of that one listener.

The great advantage of radio is that it's such a sinuous medium, it can change shape and form. There are new forms emerging, and the dilution of existing forms and more cross-over between ideas associated with feature work and those that are part of daily programming. The forms will become more blurred, and there will be new forms of dialogue, for the one-on-one relationship with the listener. Already, via e-mail, there is far greater access available than there ever was by telephone.

John Quinn

Producer and presenter of The Open Mind

Radio is boundless, with never-ending possibilities. And yet it's a very intimate medium. As the programme-maker, you're the conversationalist or the storyteller by the fireside - it has extraordinary warmth about it.

A woman wrote to me recently and said: "You've given me my third-level education". That's a very humbling thing.

I grew up on radio, and I have great regard for traditional radio. I worry about how little reflective radio there is now, when we're so much in the era of the soundbite. There's little enough time to explore ideas.

There is and hopefully always will be a place and a time for the sort of things I do. I can have the same guy who gets five or 10 minutes with Pat Kenny and Marian Finucane, and give him the whole programme or two programmes.

Perhaps it's peripheral in terms of ratings, but I still believe in what radio can do. People will always love a good story.

Julian Vignoles

Now TV producer and formerly producer of live programmes and documentaries on radio

You can be very creative on live shows, but people tend to remember the times you go out alone with a tape recorder. It's a bit like the baker who is appreciated for the wedding cake prepared for a special Saturday, but not for the everyday bread. There's plenty of creativity in simply knowing that the right person to get to talk about a particular story is so-and-so. Creativity is too often described in an elitist way. The highest praise we get in radio is when someone tells us: "I couldn't get out of the car".

Documentaries on radio are marginalised. On TV, Would You Believe gets multiples of the audiences this sort of story-telling gets on radio. Most radio documentary-makers in Europe have gone away from story-driven programmes and into an aesthetic sort of thing.

No matter what sort of programme it is, you should strive to get as many listeners as possible: if you have a programme about painting, and all - or almost all - the people interested in painting aren't listening, then you've failed.

There's a danger here of going the BBC Radio 4 road. One of the great things about RTE Radio 1 is that it still has a very wide appeal. And that's largely due to the commercial ethic: we don't do things to please advertisers, but it keeps us focused on the audience. You have to be a Star as well as an Irish Times.

Roger Gregg

Actor, radio dramatist and independent producer. His Crazy Dog Audio Theatre will perform a series of live radio comedies this autumn on RTE Radio 1

My work is in a tradition that's resolutely North American. I was hugely influenced, growing up in the 1970s, by a comedy group called the Firesign Theater. All their stuff was in the style of old-time radio, with flashbacks, music, suspense, horror, piss-takes of the detective genre.

There's a huge amnesia now about radio drama. It's sad - people are forgetting what an uncontested, powerful medium this was. And while in America it was swamped by television, the public broadcasting ethos in this part of the world meant it survived here. It's worth remembering that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy started as a radio series.

Bookstores in the US have whole shelves full of old-time radio on CD. With dumbed-down crap up and down the dial, a lot of people sitting in their cars would rather listen to a half-hour old-time radio show - they had the biggest stars, the best writers, the slickest production values; and the fierce competition in radio meant there was a premium on keeping the momentum up.

Now that drama is in this public-service bubble, protected from the capitalist selection process, it generally lacks that urgency; it's the Art, darling. Or else it's the cheap 'n' nasty alternative for people who'd rather be writing for the stage, or TV, or film. Of course, I'd be at the barricades throwing Molotov cocktails protecting the slots for radio drama!

Stephen Price

Senior producer of The Last Word on Today FM

I was working for the BBC in Derry and had become disenchanted with state broadcasting when I was asked down to Radio Ireland to produce Eamon Dunphy. I sat and watched Dunphy and Dan Collins have a fight for three-quarters of an hour - that was my interview. I thought, "If I can get this guy on the radio, it'll be great."

At that time, in 1997, the idea that you could do a current-affairs show with a strong personality streak running through it certainly wouldn't have been an accepted ideal. The same goes for long interviews, and "cartoons" on the radio as part of a current-affairs show.

The competition, Five Seven Live, was tightly formatted. I thought that was limited - the triumph of the jingle over content. Anyway, we didn't have the resources any more than the inclination to do that kind of thing.

When RTE do 10 minutes from a foreign earthquake zone, they're only doing it because they can. The Last Word has made a virtue of necessity: we have no network of foreign correspondents, no substantial newsroom. Our budget for guests and contributors is £55,000 a year, without any infrastructure whatsover. Any radio show that goes out pretending to be the authority on anything is doing just that - pretending.

We didn't set out to take on the world. We just did our own thing.

John MacKenna

Senior producer at RTE radio

I love working on my own, setting out to shape a programme from start to finish - from the idea, to the recording, to the editing. You'll never get the perfection you set out for, but when you don't it's not anybody else's fault.

Of course there is the danger of getting mesmerised by the subject. I do like to have someone else there, often at the editing stage, when a sound-operator can say to me: "I don't get that, it really doesn't work".

I also like the fact that I can remove myself from the programme. I love to hear the subject talking, when you don't hear the presenter, you don't hear the producer. The programmes I've been happiest with have featured just one or two people talking about things that are close to their hearts.

When I did work in daily programming, it was an interesting and broadening experience, but I don't think you can do the sort of thing I like doing: there's that personality thing with the presenter that drives the live programmes. It actually requires more time to do what I do - time to take myself out of the programme.

Even on the daytime programmes, if people are allowed the time and space to speak from the heart, that's when it works best. Everybody has a story to tell - and there will always be somebody out there with whom it will connect.

Tim Lehane

Senior producer of features programmes

Wasn't it McLuhan who called radio a warm medium?

Radio has changed enormously in the last 30 or 40 years. There used to be a more guarded sense of who got on the air, and what sort of voice they must have. There's a much more demotic feel to it now.

Radio, in particular the Radio 1, or BBC Radio 4, model, offered a "virtual community" long before the Internet existed. I think of it like a village: there are certain homes you like to visit and hear what's going on, and some other houses you pass by in a hurry.

We need to think of radio as something other than simply a commercial beast. What bonds readers to a newspaper? Perhaps it's not so much the treatment of international events on the front page; it might be the crossword, or Doonesbury, or Weather Eye, or the chess column. Programmes like the ones I do are part of the variety of "village life".

It's so difficult to predict how the future of radio is going to unfold, with digital offering the possibility of much more narrowly targeted programming. I don't think young people have ever spent as much time listening to material as they do today, but who knows what they will listen to in 20 years' time. My own instinct is for all the eccentricities, richness and passion of that village I was talking about.