Two film posters hang behind Alan Esslemont’s head; Rocky Ros Muc, a 2017 documentary on the life of pugilist Seán Mannion and Arracht, the acclaimed survivalist thriller set during the Great Famine. 

Taken together, they tell a story of how Esslemont, a Scottish native and director general of TG4, is courting something different for the Irish language: Laying a pathway for film to earn status for the native tongue and, in doing so, pursuing greater purpose for TG4 as a public service broadcaster.

Esslemont, who has held the top job in TG4 since 2016, sees a far greater responsibility in his role than commissioning great programmes and increasing ratings. 

TG4 not only functions to protect the Irish language from mainstream erosion but to enable it and promote its diversity and sustainability, he told The Currency, over a video call.

“Ireland’s single biggest contribution to global diversity has been the ability to pass on the Irish language from generation to generation,” he said.

This is the message that Esslemont is trying to “get into people’s heads”, and it seems he has found a way to communicate it. 

An Oscar winner?

Last week, on a brilliant day for Irish film, An Cailín Ciúin was nominated in the international feature film category at the Academy Awards and it is being reported as a front-runner by the trade publication Variety.

An Cailín Ciúin, an elegiac adaptation of Foster by Claire Keegan, is the most commercially successful Irish-language film ever, grossing more than €1 million at the box office. Aside from the upcoming Academy Awards, it has won a constellation of others prizes including a Grand Prix Award at the Berlinale and seven Irish Film and Television Academy Awards.

It was Esslemont who first suggested the idea of making Irish-language cinema to James Hickey, then chief executive of Screen Ireland, as a way to build status for the Irish language and to find new and unexpected audiences.

Hickey and the BAI were enthusiastic and the result was Cine4, an initiative backed by the three organisations, and one which would go on to enable the making of An Cailín Ciúin, written and directed by Colm Bairéad and produced by Cleona Ní Chrualaoi of Inscéal.

It is an uncomfortable truth that, at the whiff of international recognition, Irish people take content, whether film or journalism, more seriously. But it was a truth that Esslemont was banking on. 

The release of An Cailín Ciúin, which was exquisitely shot, was carefully orchestrated – it premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, and was based on the “U2 model” of breaking into other markets before approaching home. 

Esslemont agrees that it often takes international recognition for work to be recognised as important and for greater gravitas to be ascribed to it locally. 

And so this has been the stated ambition for Cine4, not only to have a new entry every year to the Oscars but to win international acclaim.

Cine4 provides an initial grant to develop a screenplay or idea and a budget of €1.2 million for the two chosen films per round of the scheme. Other productions to come out of the initiative include Arracht and Róise & Frank – both of which have won awards internationally.

“The two most important things that TG4 does for Irish is mainstream the language, so it is in everyone’s corner, and also to create status for the language,” Esslemont said.

His great concern is that Ireland is at risk of a social phenomenon called ‘language shift’, where one language replaces another, resulting not only in the loss of the original language but also of access to culture, heritage, and stories.

The peril of ‘language shift’ is what is driving him and others to think more and more ambitiously and to remain discontented with how he believes Irish is treated by politicians in Ireland.

Although from the outside, it appears TG4 is doing better than ever before – it had record viewing figures over the Christmas period and it had a considerable bump in funding in recent years – inside, there is a starkly different barometer for success.

Monolithic avoidance

TG4 was first established in 1996 as Teilifís na Gaeilge and was modelled on Channel Four, where there was less pressure on ratings and more space to be creative. But the way TG4 was set up has hamstrung the broadcaster since, as Esslemont puts it: “We were born in the wrong paradigm and we really need that to change if public service media and the Irish language are to move forward.”

As part of the broadcaster’s Post-Covid Vision, which takes it up to 2025, it is seeking a public funding increase of €37.8 million by 2025 – bringing its total public funding to €78.6 million, equivalent to 40 per cent of RTÉ’s 2019 licence fee income.

Currently, the Irish language broadcaster receives 18.4 per cent of RTÉ’s licence fee income – a “major imbalance” in TG4’s view.  

“We were set up to be something small, something nice, but that is not going to work for the creation of status for the Irish language. We need to be on a different flight path than the one we were set up under,” Esslemont said.

Under the Post-Covid Vision, the majority of additional funding would be invested in the independent production sector including 1,200 new hours of original content for younger audiences, audio-visual education supports for students and adults, and 278 new hours of original Irish language film and drama.

The blocks Esslemont sees in TG4 reaching these greater heights, and gaining wider and new audiences, are money and political will.

S4C as a target

Other than a few years spent setting up and running BBC Alba in Scotland, Esslemont has been with TG4 since its inception and over the years he has dealt with countless politicians who he says have shown little interest in the broadcaster beyond its ability to create jobs and add to the regional economy. 

“In general, in the past, it was very difficult. The only thing that got traction in the past with politicians was our ability to create within the creative economy,” Esslemont said, “but that was as far as it went.”

“It is not right that we are at a tenth of RTÉ’s turnover. We should be at least treated in the same way as the Welsh language broadcaster, S4C, who have double our funding. I have asked politician after politician why our funding isn’t the same as S4C and none of them have answered.”

With the change of government in 2020, however, he said there has been a more receptive party in Minister Catherine Martin and the Secretary General of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, Katherine Licken. 

“They have been willing to listen to our arguments about the role of TG4 and the language and our role in making sure that language shift doesn’t happen in Ireland,” Esslemont said. 

New News

While TG4’s Post-Covid Vision depends on incremental increases in funding over the next few years, by the end of 2023 Esslemont anticipates that the broadcaster will have a different “look and feel” and a greater plurality in its news service.

Earlier this year, TG4 appointed its first head of news and current affairs, Deirdre Ní Choistín, following a recommendation from the Future of Media Commission that the minority language broadcaster have editorial independence.

Under the Broadcasting Act 2009, the TG4 news service is part of RTÉ’s statutory one-hour-a-day provision to TG4.

Now, part of Ní Choistín’s role will be to negotiate for TG4’s own news provision and to expand its services.

He welcomed the appointment of Siún Ní Raghallaigh, a former chair of TG4’s board, as the new chair of RTE. “Siún is very much an RTÉ outsider. There is a strong relationship between TG4 and Siún, she will bring new focus, and in the context of comms it is a lot easier now,” he said.

The longer-term vision of TG4, past 2025, will in some ways rely on what comes out of a review of all Irish language media, including TG4 and RTÉ, and RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, that was recommended by the Future of Media Commission last year. There is no expected date for the conclusion of that review.