Sanguine valour doesn’t cut it when you haemorrhage hosts and young listeners

‘How amazing is it that a station like 2FM is on the front page of every paper today?” Despite a studied performance of chipper optimism, 2FM chief Dan Healy gave away some major insights about the psyche of the supposed national youth station, maybe in spite of himself.

Healy, who has been head of 2FM for over a decade, made himself available for an interview with RTÉ Radio 1’s Claire Byrne yesterday morning after four presenters on each of its three most popular shows announced they were leaving the station in recent weeks.

With Doireann Garrihy leaving the breakfast show, Jennifer Zamparelli stepping away from her mid-morning show and The 2 Johnnies ending their hugely successful drive-time show, it means 2FM has lost at least one presenter from nine of the 18 hours of original radio programming it puts out each weekday.

Yet Healy seemed flattered by the fact 2FM’s woes were attracting any media attention at all to be overly worried by the fact the station he runs is haemorrhaging hosts. The bad press was going to be great for the JNLRs, he maintained. All the front pages and media queries were proof, apparently, that “2FM matters”.

Well, with more than €3.2m of all of our licence fees going into it, it should – shouldn’t it?

When Healy joined in 2013, he described 2FM as a “sleeping giant” and vowed he would try to make it the most listened-to music and entertainment station in Ireland.

It is startling that the same person should, in 2024, talk about 2FM as if it were an insecure younger sister who is grateful for any notice at all.

With the same kind of sanguine valour as the band who kept playing as the Titanic went down, he looked Byrne in the eye and promised her that this “is an exciting time”.

Despite his breezy attitude to a probably inevitable drop in listenership in the wake of The 2 Johnnies’ departure and his claims that there were “nuanced” reasons for the biggest names in his stable of talent all leaving almost at once, he did concede that the new register of interests and gifts did play a role in some presenters deciding to leave.

This confirms what many in the industry have long believed: that a crackdown on outside earnings and sponsorship deals was always likely to have a disproportionate impact on 2FM.

However, offered the chance by Byrne to push back on those new rules and maybe make the case that 2FM operates in a different media climate where presenters always have multiple jobs, Healy declined.

He sought to make a strong case for 2FM’s key role in the reform of RTÉ, shouldering the burden of attracting and keeping a young audience for the broadcaster.

Healy pointed out that 2FM has a 12.2pc share of the 15- to 34-year-old audience, a share it hopes to increase to 14pc by next year.

But 15 to 34 is an incredibly broad age range that covers Gen Alpha, Gen Z and millennials. Anyone who switched over from RTÉ Radio 1 on Friday might have heard 2FM DJs playing Mary J Blige’s 2001 hit Family Affair, or Disclosure’s 2012 hit Latch among more recent chart successes.

Byrne queried whether 2FM listeners, who regularly text in about their weddings or family life, really skew as young as Healy would suggest?

“You have to programme to the available,” Healy said, rather than what is not there.

Which begs the question: If the younger audience is not yet there, isn’t it 2FM’s job to find them?