But if the audience isn't there, why not? Does it want or need a station whose "identity", as Crimmins says, is "to support Western classical music"?
It's not a disaster, the RTE marketeers will tell you - just a bit of a disappointment. But try to suggest to them that the poor listenership figures for Lyric FM may possibly be down to some failure of effort or investment on their part, and the hackles rise ominously. Even by the standards of an organisation famed for its defensiveness, Lyric seems to be a touchy subject.
To be fair, if director of radio Helen Shaw is being accused of not caring enough about Lyric's success, then I'm voting "not guilty". When Shaw talks about the performance of RTE's classical music and arts station, it's with the same obsessive attention to detail that characterises her approaches to Radio 1 and 2FM. And when she budgets cash for Lyric's publicity campaigns, it's with the same sort of money that she devotes to its far larger brethren.
Now, that's not an awful lot of money: about £200,000 a year, less than a third of what commercial easy-listening station Lite FM spent in its launch months to grab a big audience in Dublin alone. "In the first six months of 2000, we probably weren't doing as much as you need to do for a new station," Shaw says.
Not everyone thinks the marketing, which has emphasised the creation of a "relaxing" brand, has had the right emphasis. "I believe we should market the music more," says Lyric's director, Seamus Crimmins. "And that's what we're going to do in the next campaign, starting in April."
Nevertheless, enough has been spent, and wisely enough, Shaw says, to ensure that a sizeable majority of people surveyed in RTE research know what Lyric is and what it has to offer.
Trouble is: they still don't want to listen. Lyric's audience has actually slipped from its "trial" levels after the May, 1999, launch. Its market share now stands at a bare 2 per cent - better, it should be noted, than Radio Ireland after its truly disastrous first six months, but still some way from its year-one target of 3 per cent.
While the station is often criticised by people who are serious about classical music (people far more qualified than I am to comment, it should be said) for being a rip-off of the avowedly populist British commercial station, Classic FM, it's certainly not imitating Classic's ratings. Classic has more than six million listeners, and a share of nearly 5 per cent in a more competitive marketplace; throw in the 1.2 per cent share of the far more "difficult" BBC Radio 3, and you have a British market for serious music radio that, in percentage terms, is three times bigger than what Lyric has managed to scoop.
So what's the problem? Why is Lyric, literally, a turn-off? Among many occasional listeners - remember, there are still 100,000 tuning in daily - there's a surprising tendency to blame the presenters. Surely that should hardly matter on a classical music station, where the presenters are low-key and low-profile, and where the most listened-to programme is the rarely interrupted Full Score?
"Listeners still want that relationship of trust with the presenter," says Shaw. Some presenters haven't had much reason to build up a relationship of trust with Lyric: starting on April 9th, Lyric Breakfast will get what, by my count, is its fourth presenter in less than two years, as Sam Wilcock (mercifully) gives way to Sean Rocks. Eamonn Lawlor's seat on Into the Evening seems more secure, although both morning and evening drive-times are recognised as slots where Lyric needs to get stronger - but where it's up against the news hunger of its core audience. Lunchtime request shows, reflecting Lyric at its most familiar and populist, are also seen as key audience-builders. The weekend listening figures, released this month, show that presenter Des Keogh has substantially increased the audience for what you might call the Sunday-dinner programme, Lyric World Requests.
So, presenters have been part of the problem. Who else? Aha, the audience!
"The level of musical literacy for serious music in Ireland is really quite low," Shaw says. Lyric, she adds, needs to give listeners "the opportunity to develop and grow in taste" - she's loath to say it needs to "educate" them. Shamelessly pedagogic segments such as "ABC Sharp" on Lyric Notes have just that goal in mind.
But if the audience isn't there, why not? Does it want or need a station whose "identity", as Crimmins says, is "to support Western classical music"?
"This is a voice," he says, "and we must defend it. It's fundamentally a cultural thing. Our audience is urban, middle-aged and monied." It's also overwhelmingly based in the Pale. "Some people regard this music as not for them," Crimmins argues. He compares it to a "foreign language" for most listeners; indeed, he says Lyric is cutting back on most opera and other vocal music in its daytime schedule, so punters aren't faced with "foreign language on top of a foreign language".
Even while BBC Radio 3 has started including jazz and world music in its daytime schedule, Lyric has stuck to its classical guns, ignoring, by day anyway, trad, folk, show tunes - the sort of sounds that might just hook more Irish listeners. (Lyric's more inclusive evening programming earns its highest market share.)
Crimmins reckons there is still a "natural" audience out there, remaining to be convinced about Lyric - ordinary people involved in local musical societies or choirs, for instance. "But people think it's too posh, too swanky," he says. How do you take the "class" out of classical?
Low ratings also damage Lyric's ambitions as an arts station. Shaw says it would be difficult to justify pouring more money into programming while the numbers remain so low.
Perhaps, in the end, it doesn't matter, so long as this small, urban, monied group of listeners (BMW has sponsored Lawlor's show) is pleased to have its preferred music on the radio. Crimmins still talks about Lyric like a kid who has discovered the perfect pirate station: "I'm still so excited to hear this music going out on the air. Sometimes I want to roll down the car window and turn the radio up!"