The first local terrestrial TV station in Ireland was Channel 9, which also established the country’s first TV network outside of Dublin, Belfast, and Galway. Many people, both locally and elsewhere, sneered and declared it couldn’t be done and that it would never happen when the project was initially publicised in the local press two years previously, in 1997. But ultimately, Channel 9 went on the air, becoming one of the first three local terrestrial TV stations in the entire UK to launch under the new local licencing system put in place at the time by the ITC.