Dubliners will have three new commercial radio stations to choose from by next spring, when the successful applicants for new licences for the capital should all be on air.
Two new music stations, Lite FM, aimed at listeners aged 35 and over, and Spin FM, for 15-to-34s, will be joined by News Talk FM, a music-free station which will offer a rolling 20-minute news service at key times of the day and pose the most direct threat to RTE Radio 1.
The new stations will be signing contracts with the Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC) for 10-year licences. A new five-year licence has also been granted to the existing Irish-language service in Dublin, Raidio na Life, which will change frequencies from 102.2 to 106.4FM.
The decisions of the 10-member IRTC board were announced at a press conference in Dublin yesterday, after the board had conferred for several hours.
The day's notable losers included two former "pirate" operators who were widely tipped to succeed in "going legit". Dancemusic station Pulse FM and indierock station Phantom FM both went off the air on July 1st, the IRTC's deadline for unlicensed stations seeking the new licences.
In all categories, Mr Conor Maguire SC, chairman of the IRTC, said, "the competition was extremely intense and the decisions were close".
The competition for the youth-oriented (15-to-34) service - the "dance" licence - was billed as the battle of U2. It was won by the band's former accountant, Mr Ossie Kilkenny, chairman of the Spin FM consortium. U2's guitarist, The Edge, and the group's manager, Mr Paul McGuinness, were involved respectively in the losing Storm FM and Pulse FM consortiums. The winning Spin consortium also includes among its shareholders British dance-music entrepreneurs Ministry of Sound and Radio 2000, the company which owns one of Dublin's existing pop-music stations, 98FM.
"From 98FM's perspective, it'll be good to have a sister station there," Mr Ken Hutton, the general manager of 98FM, said. He denied, however, that there was any prospect of the stations co-operating in pursuit of advertisers.
Mr Maguire said the IRTC was satisfied that Radio 2000's 25 per cent stake in Spin FM was a "passive shareholding".
Mr Martin Block, a radio consultant and chief executive of the successful Lite FM consortium, was "bullish" about the prospects for his music-driven service for the over-35s.
"In the course of our research we found that the core RTE Radio 1 listeners could not find a station that was musically suited to them - something they'd tune into for an hour or an hour-and-a-half, then return to Radio 1 for the key items," he said.
Lite FM, which will have a mix ranging from Sixties pop to new music from the likes of Celine Dion, is targeting mid-April as a start-up date.
By far the most disappointed faces at the press conference belonged to the young men from Spirit FM, which as Phantom FM previously broadcast as a pirate and continues to transmit legally via the Internet. Its application in the special-interest category, sharing a shortlist with Radio France Internationale, was unsuccessful; the IRTC chose not to award any licence in this category.
"We're very, very disappointed," Mr Simon Maher, the Spirit FM chairman, said.