RTÉ has helped many directors on the path to success. Its latest initiative could continue that tradition. Patrick Butler reports.

At a time when other television channels are becoming increasingly unimaginative, it is satisfying to report that the national broadcaster is doing its bit to promote emerging film talent. On Saturday Network 2 launched Shortscreen, RTÉ's new showcase for Irish and Irish-related short dramas. The first film in the series was the award-winning Meeting Che Guevara, directed by Anthony Byrne and starring John Hurt.

Shortscreen has been neatly positioned between two regular feature-film slots: Cineplex, which screens popular mainstream films, and Cineclub, which favours art-house material. "You get a good dish of films," says Eilish Kent of RTÉ.

Shorts are notoriously difficult to schedule on television and are therefore usually confined to being seen by small audiences at film festivals. "A lot of broadcasters find them hard to schedule because they are so short and because they schedule in half-hour blocks. They can be quite hard to place," says Kent. "Our aspiration on Shortscreen is to have a home for short film." Its clever timetabling means Shortscreen could attract relatively large audiences.

RTÉ's previous showcase for short films, Debut, was usually broadcast from August to October. It hopped about the schedules, however, making it hard to pin down from one week to the next. In a leap of faith, Shortscreen will air all year round, screening up to three films at a time, depending on their length.

So why, instead of relegating them to the small hours, is RTÉ giving shorts a decent showing? "We're allowing people to see the work that is being done. And we're allowing film-makers to get feedback," says Kent. It's not all about altruism, however. RTÉ's funding of numerous shorts helps forge links with up-and-coming talent. "People who have come through the short-film schemes have ended up directing and writing television drama for us. So it's a way of developing talent," she says.

Ian Fitzgibbon, for example, went from a short part-funded by the station to the acclaimed comedy Paths To Freedom and, most recently, the feature film Spin The Bottle, in which RTÉ was the prime investor. Other film-makers whose careers have also been helped include Declan Recks and Lisa Mulcahy, directors of The Clinic and On Home Ground. Their colleague Stephen Burke picked up awards around the world for 81, his RTÉ-backed short, before going on to direct the award-winning drama series No Tears, which dramatised the hepatitis-C scandal.

Shortscreen does more than indicate an increase in the number of shorts being shown on television. Its predecessor focused on independent, student and low-budget films partly funded by RTÉ; the new series is all-encompassing, featuring the fruit of initiatives by RTÉ, TG4, the Arts Council, the Irish Film Board and others. It is therefore likely to reach a higher standard than Debut.

Two of the strands that are being incorporated into Shortscreen have been hugely beneficial for the Irish film industry. Frameworks, which featured animation, provided the money for Cathal Gaffney to make the Oscar-nominated Give Up Your Aul Sins. The prestigious Short Cuts series, for budgets of up to €80,000, funded 35 Aside, Damien O'Donnell's award-winning breakthrough short. The next film he directed was the hit East Is East.

So what kind of short dramas can we expect to see in the coming year? Most of the 100 or so films to be screened are live action and in English, but some are animated and some are in Irish. Among the latter is Clare Sa Speir, which is on the Leaving Certificate Irish course.

Seamus Duggan, Shortscreen's programmer, unsurprisingly suggests that there is something to suit everyone: thrillers, comedies, horror, sci-fi and childhood experiences, for example.

Duggan - manager of Filmbase, a driving force behind short-film production in Ireland, providing equipment, training and funding to hopeful film-makers - was given a free hand to choose what will be shown.

It is an indication of the number of people who are making shorts that the new slot received twice as many submissions as it needed to fill the year. Duggan says, however, that his primary aim was to ensure a mainstream audience would, at the very least, be entertained by what it saw. "I hope for a lot of people it will be a good investment of their time," he says.

A fan of Eastern European cinema, Duggan says he couldn't resist The Water Fight, which was shot in Co Donegal by students at Poland's National Film, Television & Theatre School, in the city of Lódz, under the direction of an Irish classmate.

Duggan also likes the shortest film to be screened in the series, The Unbearable. Made in Cork, it clocks in at just a minute and 47 seconds. "It's a joke short, but it does it perfectly," he says. He also mentions Pitch & Putt, a three-minute film directed by Donald Clarke, the Irish Times film critic. Viewers "might enjoy the chance to turn the tables and see what they think of his film", says Duggan.

RTÉ hopes that Shortscreen will introduce a new audience to short films and that it may even inspire the next generation of film-makers. Kent insists you don't have to be in the business to enjoy the series. "It's for anybody who likes films," she says.

The next in the Shortscreen series, The Last Time, is on Saturday at 11.10 p.m. on Network 2

If you can't make it to a television on Saturday nights, you could always spend part of your lunch hour exploring www.eif.ie, which bills itself as Ireland's first online cinema.

It aims to première one Irish short each weekday.

Although it won't be premièring any more short films until later in the month, you can still log on to view films that have already been posted on the site, such as Ground Zero by Paco Torres.

The service is free, but you need to register; you can then view up to 30 films a month.