I had made a few attempts before at setting up a new channel, but I just couldn't break through. The fact was that there were no content licences available, and, at the time, only cable companies could put out their own channels . . . except that they were only interested in aggregating existing material from outside, and the concept of an indigenous Irish channel was just not on the agenda.

But that changed following legislation in 2003; although, for some time, there was nobody taking the new licences up. So I pitched NTL, and they went for it.

And at what point did it become a good idea?

I was really a question of "why not?" combined with my own experience. I had been involved in production and presenting for a number of years, and had worked on both sides of the camera, so I understood the industry. My production experience was driven by an in-house approach in the past, and I felt that we could bring decent production values to drive a low-cost product.

Do people want to watch lowcost TV?

There is a difference between low-cost and crap.

When we started, I knew that we could end up with something like "Wayne's World", or we could end up with something like Channel 4. I feel that we are somewhere in the middle . . . we know our limitations, but we also know from our advertisers that we have a watchable product. The key issue is to be niche . . . it doesn't matter if there are only three people watching it, at least they will be watching something different.

So what have you brought that is different to what is already on offer? Is there anything that you are particularly proud of?

From a technology point of view, we are fibre-based, so we use broadband as our primary carriage to the head end (which means that City Channel is the only station sending its signal to NTL by broadband rather than satellite). But, from a content perspective, we are doing stuff that nobody else is doing. For example, we do a gay show, and we are very strong on ethnic programming . . . especially Polish, Filipino and African.

We also deal with issues that are local . . . for example, in the run-up to the elections, we have panel discussions with the candidates. It's a very micro-approach to the subject, and RTE are not doing it at the moment.

And do you feel that you have been successful?

It's working very well. We are now 18 months down the road, and the company is in operating profit, with no debt. We have built the channel up, and by the end of this year, we will have a station in the five major cities in Ireland. So we'd consider that to be an achievement.

But I would also say that we have done it without any subventions or licence money. It is extraordinary to us that RTE gets 185m of licence fees, and a further 285m of advertising revenue, and that's all we get for our money? I'd advocate for the licence fee to be scrapped entirely . . . after all, RTE should be able to survive on 225m.