Finucane loses 100,000 weekend listeners

Almost 100,000 listeners have turned off Marian Finucane at the weekends in the last year, according to the latest figures from the Joint National Listenership Research.

The veteran presenter has seen her RTÉ Radio 1 listenership drop on Saturday from 385,000 last year to 358,000. On Sundays, she is seeing a 20% drop, from 364,000 to 291,000.

The latest JNLRs do not make pretty reading for a number of presenters with both RTÉ and Today FM.

Ryan Tubridy’s listenership on RTÉ 2FM has dropped by 13,000 in the last year to 159,000 and his competitor for the mid-morning audience, Today FM’s Ray D’Arcy, has suffered a decline of 6,000 over the same period.

Other Today FM star names have also suffered an exodus. The listenership for Ian Dempsey has dropped by 8,000 to 175,000 and Matt Cooper’s from 166,000 to 156,000.

The big winners in yesterday’s JNLR figures appears to be RTÉ Radio 1’s News at One and Drivetime, the former experiencing an increase of 19,000 to 369,000 and the latter jumping from 245,000 to 260,000.

Joe Duffy’s Liveline has added 7,000, listeners bringing his total to 424,000.

While Morning Ireland has lost 6,000 listeners in the past year, it remains the most listened to programme on radio with an audience of 443,000.

Pat Kenny has experienced a drop of 8,000 to 325,000 for his daily show while John Murray has lost 7,000 listeners and now has an audience of 327,000.

On RTÉ 2FM, the big winner was Breakfast with Hector, which saw listenership rise by 6,000 to 128,000.

At Newstalk, there was good news for a number of presenters. Sean Moncrieff saw his total increase by 6,000 to 104,000, George Hook’s rose by 2,000 over the year to 132,000, and Tom Dunne saw an increase of 3,000 to 55,000

Clare Duignan, managing director of RTÉ Radio pointed out that, in terms of book-on-book totals — where the results are prepared to the last quarter — there had been gains “almost across the full day”. As regards RTÉ 2FM, she also appeared to mainly focus on the book-on-book comparison when she said there had been gains for Hector, Colm Hayes, and Larry Gogan.

At Today FM, the station pointed out that it reaches one-in-five adults aged 20-44 in Ireland (340,000) which, it said “puts the station ahead of all RTÉ services as well as other national, regional, and local broadcasters”.