The Screen Between Us

There is something faintly absurd about a family in Wexford unable to catch up on Bargain Hunt online, given that they can already watch it live on Virgin Media. Two islands, one natural broadcasting market, a shared language (mostly), centuries of intertwined history — and the streaming servers say: not for you.

The Invisible Wall

Let us be clear about what is and is not already happening. BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Four and Channel 4 are on the Virgin Media Ireland and Sky Ireland channel lists. Irish pay-TV subscribers can watch British television live. This is not a new development; cable operators in Ireland have been relaying BBC since 1963, when the signal was already reaching forty per cent of the population via rooftop aerials. The idea that Britain and Ireland share a broadcasting culture is not a proposal. It is a historical fact that the current arrangements are busy trying to undo.

What is blocked is catch-up. The BBC iPlayer is geoblocked at the Irish border. ITVX does not operate in the Republic. My5 is absent. A viewer in Cork who watches Countryfile on Sunday evening and wants to see what they missed at the start cannot do so. The programme was available to them live. The same broadcaster has decided, for reasons that dissolve under scrutiny, that the catch-up version is off limits.

The BBC made that geoblocking decision. It can unmake it. This requires no Irish government cooperation, no treaty, no intergovernmental working group. It requires the BBC to stop doing something pointless. Similarly, ITV and Channel 5 choosing not to operate streaming services in the Republic is a commercial decision, not a legal necessity. The combined Irish market is not negligible. The decision to ignore it is, at this point, simply habit.

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What the Programmes Could Do

Beyond the streaming fix, there is a larger question that broadcasters have simply declined to ask: what would British television look like if it acknowledged that Ireland exists?

Bargain Hunt films across the country — Coleraine, Harrogate, Wetherby, Shrewsbury. There is no editorial reason it cannot film in Wexford or Kilkenny. The antiques are there. The auction rooms are there. The enthusiastic amateur dealers who make terrible decisions are emphatically there. A Bargain Hunt episode in Coleraine followed by one across the water in a comparable Irish market town would barely register as a format change. It would, however, register with viewers on both sides as a signal that the programme considers them part of the same world.

Countryfile covers farming, landscape and rural life. The island of Ireland has all three in abundance. The agricultural policy questions facing an Irish hill farmer and a Welsh hill farmer are, post-Brexit, more divergent than they were — which makes them more interesting, not less. A Countryfile that occasionally crossed to Connemara or the Wicklow uplands would be a better programme as well as a more honest one.

A Place in the Country, Escape to the Country, the whole apparatus of aspirational rural property television: Ireland is one of the most obvious destinations for the British buyer priced out of the Cotswolds. It already happens in large numbers. Television has simply decided not to notice.

Then there is the celebrity dimension. I’m A Celebrity is one of the most-watched programmes across these islands. When The Edge is sitting in the jungle eating something unspeakable, that is a moment of shared archipelago culture. It should be available to a viewer in Galway on the same catch-up terms as a viewer in Guildford.

Sport: The Most Scandalous Omission

If any single issue illustrates the absurdity of British-Irish media separation, it is sport.

The GAA is the largest sporting organisation on the island of Ireland, with a diaspora presence across Britain that is substantial and comprehensively underserved. Gaelic football and hurling finals are followed avidly in Birmingham, Glasgow, and London — there are more GAA clubs in Britain than in several Irish counties. Yet BBC and ITV give them essentially nothing. TG4’s coverage of Gaelic games — genuinely world-class production on a fraction of the BBC’s budget — is invisible to a British audience that would, in considerable numbers, watch it.

Then there is the Six Nations. This is an all-islands event by definition — Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, all in it together, every February and March. Yet Irish viewers trying to catch highlights are told the content is not available in their region, as if Wales were on the far side of the moon. The tournament exists precisely because of the relationship between these nations. The broadcast infrastructure should reflect that rather than working against it.

Politics: The Coverage Gap Nobody Talks About

British news programmes cover French elections, German coalition negotiations, and Italian governmental chaos as a matter of routine. Irish politics gets essentially nothing, despite the fact that the Irish state is a closer neighbour than any of them, shares a land border with the United Kingdom, and is bound to Britain by the Good Friday Agreement, the Common Travel Area, and several hundred years of shared and disputed history.

The Andrew Marr Show, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Newsnight, Question Time: none of these treat Irish political developments as a standing item. The formation of a coalition government in Dublin, a Dáil debate on housing or immigration, a controversy at Stormont — these appear, if at all, as brief foreign-desk mentions. They should be part of the furniture, in the same way that Scottish and Welsh political developments are.

I make no apology for saying so plainly. I am not framing these arguments through the lens of historical grievance or post-colonial obligation. I say it because it is practically true: what happens in Dublin affects Belfast, and what happens in Belfast affects the rest of these islands. The coverage should reflect that, not out of sensitivity, but out of accuracy.

The Streamers Have No Excuse

Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, Amazon Prime: these companies operate as single entities across both islands. Their content libraries — less justifiably — do not. Licensing agreements mean that a show on British Netflix may be absent from Irish Netflix and vice versa. Viewers know this. They resent it. They route around it with VPNs, which puts them in the faintly ridiculous position of technically breaching their terms of service to watch a programme that was available to them last Tuesday in a different postcode.

The streaming platforms should be required, as a condition of operating in either jurisdiction, to offer a unified British-Irish library. This is a regulatory ask that both Ofcom and Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán could pursue in parallel — and it is precisely the kind of practical, non-constitutional cooperation that the British-Irish relationship needs more of and gets less of than it should.

TG4: The Underused Asset

TG4 is one of the great quiet success stories of European public broadcasting, and most people in Britain have never heard of it. Operating on a fraction of the BBC’s budget, it produces drama, sport, music and documentary content of consistent quality. Ros na Rún has been running longer than The Wire ever did. Its GAA coverage is outstanding. And its Irish-language drama has attracted serious international attention — the kind of critical warmth that BBC Four used to generate for Scandinavian imports, before someone decided that was too niche.

The BBC should carry a TG4 strand — subtitled, scheduled intelligently, not buried at midnight. Language is not a barrier here. It is a feature. An audience willing to read subtitles through six seasons of Danish crime drama is well capable of following Irish-language drama with the same assistance.

These islands share a climate, a coastline, a sporting calendar, a diaspora, and in large part a language. Their broadcasters behave as though they share nothing.

The iPlayer should work in Dublin. ITVX should work in Cork. Irish politics should be on Sunday with Laura Kuenssbergwhen something significant is happening in the Dáil. Bargain Hunt should film in Wexford. Countryfile should know that Connemara exists. The GAA final should be available in Glasgow, where there are enough people who care about it to fill Hampden twice over.

These are not grand ambitions. They are, when you set them out plainly, rather modest ones. The only remarkable thing about them is that nobody has done them yet.