Beginning at 7.30 pm each evening, listeners were given a "tuning note", generally a steady tone to enable them to "tune in" their valve receiver or crystal set properly. All broadcasts from 2RN were live, so artists had to remain at the station for long periods. Note here for example, that Miss Doran sings at 9.16 pm and at 10.25 pm, while Mr Young sings at 9.43 pm and at 10.31 pm: this was a long night for the artists.

The evening opened with a live Irish lesson. On other nights, German, French and Italian language lessons were broadcast. The overall emphasis was on music and, in particular, on solo performers. The repertoire was dull, and listeners soon tired of the seemingly endless selection of parlour songs and Edwardian ballads.

There was an occasional relay from the BBC, usually a concert relayed from London. The 2RN station trio would normally provide instrumental interludes. At this early stage (January 1926), there were still no children's programmes, (no one had been appointed yet to do the work), no news bulletins (because there was no agreement with news agencies) and not even a weather forecast.

There were few speech programmes in the early years of 2RN. Apart from the language lesson, the only speech programme this evening was a talk on gardening by Mr Sherrard of the Department of Agriculture.

Once the novelty of "Irish wireless" had worn thin, listeners became dissatisfied. But the Director had only been allocated twenty pounds a day to pay artists, and a city the size of Dublin had a limited number of artists willing to wait around the tiny Denmark Street Studio all evening to sing one or two songs.

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