Ireland’s national broadcaster RTÉ is looking for business shows to help its children cope with the country’s economic crisis.

Shelia De Courcy, commissioning editor young people’s programmes, has said she wants to encourage entrepreneurship and lateral thinking for a generation that has never known real poverty.

“There’s the joke that the only difference between Iceland and Ireland is one letter and six months. Ireland is facing a very difficult economic situation. This generation of children has grown up as the Celtic Tiger generation,” she said.

“Deprivation for them is the shop being closed – so how do we prepare these kids who have never known having nothing for the fact there is going to be 15% unemployment by the end of the year? That’s serious.”

The Irish economy grew by an average of 6.5% a year between 1990 and 2007 but shrank by 2.5% in 2008 and is predicted to fall by a further 6.5% this year – triggering a faster rise in unemployment that even the US.

RTÉ is facing its own economic troubles and has a tight budget, but is offering £20,000 per half hour and orders around 400 minutes of original programming every week.

De Courcy is also interested in repeatable shorts with strong narratives and which can air as both a standalone series and as part of a magazine show. “They must have repeatable potential. We repeat the hell out of our programmes. We show them again and again and again so they have to be very, very strong,” she told the Showcomotion children’s conference in Sheffield last week.

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