History
The station commenced broadcasting in 1979 and has undergone numerous name changes and line-up switches throughout its history. During the 2000s, Ian Dempsey and Tony Fenton opted for moves to rival radio station Today FM, whilst 2FM has in turn raided Phantom FM for Cormac Battle, Jenny Huston and Dan Hegarty, with recent additions Colm & Jim-Jim being poached from FM104. Old stalwarts such as Dave Fanning and Larry Gogan were moved to the weekend to make way for the likes of Rick O'Shea and Nikki Hayes, though Hayes was eventually moved off to the weekend herself and Gogan back to weekdays. As part of the expansion of RTÉ's young people's music radio output, an all-music (mostly of the rock genre) sister station of 2FM, RTÉ 2XM, designed for students and young adults, now operates on the RTÉ DAB Multiplex.
The station is recognised as being the first in the world to play any new single released by U2, due to the band's long-term friendship with Dave Fanning. They celebrated their thirty-year association with each other in September 2009 with the airing of a special weekend of programmes, including U2's Top 30 Moments.
In 2008, the station captured 17% of the national audience, the second most popular station in Ireland after RTÉ Radio 1 (23%). According to The Irish Times, the 09:00 AM - 12:00 midday slot is "the most critical in the 2fm schedule both in terms of audience figures and advertising revenue". This was presented by Gerry Ryan from 1988 until his sudden death on 30 April 2010. The Gerry Ryan Show was the longest running show in the station's history.
Read more about this topic: Ruth Scott
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)