The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, will press the button to start tv3 tomorrow evening. It comes on air at 5.30 p.m. with This Is tv3, a half-hour programme introducing the station.
At 6 p.m. tv3's first news programme will be transmitted, to be followed at 7 p.m. by Messrs Tylak and Rooney, a lighthearted comedy of Irish life.
The station's weekly current affairs programme, 20/20, will include an interview with the President, Mrs McAleese. There will also be a long interview with soccer star Roy Keane, which will be transmitted on both the News At Six and tv3 Sports Tonight.
TV3 has been a long time coming to our screens. The original consortium was granted the licence in 1989. In the years that followed the consortium lost the licence, was granted it again following protracted court cases against the regulator, the Independent Radio and Television Commission (IRTC), and found and lost investors.
At one time UTV was to have taken a major stake in the company but withdrew. It finally found CanWest, the Canadian television company that also runs stations in New Zealand and Australia and is the world's largest non-US purchaser of Hollywood films.
The original tv3 consortium owns 20 per cent of the shareholding, CanWest holds 45 per cent and ACT, the venture capital group, has 35 per cent.
The station is seeking an audience between the ages of 15 and 44 years with a psychological make-up of "affluent acquirers, liberal sophisticates, young aspirers and comfy full-nesters."
It is looking for a relatively modest 6 per cent of the audience, which its chairman, Mr James Morris, says it will take not necessarily from RTE, but from British terrestrial or satellite channels.
TV3 has been welcomed by the advertising industry as offering additional time, which is in very short supply at the moment. It will show up to 10 minutes an hour of advertising. RTE is allowed seven minutes.
The modesty of the station's audience ambitions, coupled with a healthy advertising industry and low overheads, has convinced most observers that tv3 will succeed and be a credible alternative.
So optimistic is tv3's sales and marketing department that it has given advertisers a guarantee of reaching certain ratings, which will either mean money back or running advertising until it has reached the required audience levels.
Meanwhile, the station has reacted to comments by the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Ms de Valera, when she opened the studios in Tallaght last Wednesday. She said she hoped that tv3 would include some Irish-language programming in its schedule.
A spokeswoman said that, unlike RTE, tv3 received no licence fee. She said RTE had a budget of £14 million to buy programmes abroad. That was almost the same as tv3's operating budget.
She also said that when tv3 was looking for programme proposals from the independent production sector, it received no proposals for Irish-language programmes, "let alone a commercially viable one."
Advertising industry sources were voicing concern over the tuning in of tv3. The anecdotal evidence suggests that many people have not tuned in yet and might not do so until the Ireland-Yugoslavia match next month, which tv3 has as part of a package of Ireland's away games in the European Cup Qualifying rounds next month.
Its early schedule is likely to use football, mini-series and films to entice the audience to sample the station and, most importantly, tune in television sets.
TV3 is devoting 15 per cent of its programming in year one to Irish-originated material, rising to 25 per cent in year five. That includes news, which tv3 has made central to its schedule, even though it is unashamedly an entertainment station.
News is important in that it will give tv3 an Irish feel, with Irish news, Irish presenters and reporters. This is to counteract the hours devoted to acquired programmes and the fear that it might look too much like Sky or other foreign channels.
It has appointed Adrian Horsman as Belfast correspondent. He has worked as Dublin correspondent for BBC Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland correspondent for GMTV. No political or London correspondents have been announced yet.
Meanwhile RTE has not taken the prospect of tv3 lying down. It has revamped Network 2 over the past year, aiming it at a younger audience. This week it announced details of its Match of the Day deal with the BBC which will allow it to show English Premier League football on Saturday nights on Network 2. With Kenny Live on RTE 1, RTE will certainly dominate Saturdays.
The advertising industry has reacted well to this, with sources suggesting that it shows RTE can operate competitively when necessary.