Pat Dolan may be counting the cost of Saturday afternoon's visit by the television cameras, but the early signs are that, having finally been coaxed into covering the matches here live, our national broadcaster is acquiring a taste for the game.

In initial discussions with the National League yesterday, RTE officials indicated their interest in carrying the December 12th game between Shelbourne and Saint Patrick's Athletic at Tolka Park as their next live transmission and, more importantly, their desire to expand the number of live games covered.

There is still some talking to be done before a final figure is arrived at, but it now appears that more than a dozen games may be shown over the course of the season, rather than the six originally intended. Whether the news will be universally welcomed is doubtful, but at least the longstanding claim that the league was good enough to be televised on a regular basis appears to have been substantiated.

Not that the early viewing figures would exactly set the broadcasting world on fire. At around 70,000 on each occasion, the television audiences for the two games so far is respectable rather than remarkable. Nevertheless, given that viewers pretty much had to be National League regulars to know that the games were on television, the numbers aren't bad. In fact, two disappointing games managed to maintain the average audience for Sports Stadium and there would appear to be considerable potential for the figures to grow between now and next summer.

After Saturday's game with Bohemians, Dolan's immediate concern was what appeared to have been a shortfall of around 2,500 in the attendance. Receipts at Richmond Park would have been down further than that figure would imply as the club, in an attempt to fill the stand for the cameras, did not charge extra for the covered seating.

The loss incurred may have been in excess of £10,000 (this in a league where a player of Jason Colwell's quality changed hands for £17,000 over the summer) and so Dolan clearly has the right to be upset. But live television obviously presents the opportunity to increase commercial revenue in other areas and the current toedipping by RTE may just prove to be the first step towards the establishment of the broadcasting revenue stream which Dolan sees as so central to the future of the game here.

First, though, there are more mundane matters to be addressed, such as whether RTE will start to show enough faith in National League football to start promoting it as their product. Shelbourne club secretary Ollie Byrne is confident that, with the right promotion, the gate on December 12th will not be damaged by the coverage - and may even be improved - but, he says, it will take a shift in attitude.

"The problem is," he says "that you have a sponsor who is saying `here you go lads, here's an amount of money for you to carve up between yourselves,' but then they are not going out and spending two or three pounds for every one that the sponsorship is worth promoting it. "Then you have RTE, who say `right, we'll fill a couple of hours with one of your matches,' but then they're not telling anybody that that is what they are going to do.

"If you look up north, you get the television companies promoting their coverage of something like the TNT Cup in advance and at the same time promoting the games. If they did that here, then it would be a big step forward," he says before pointing to the example of Guinness's sponsorship and RTE's coverage of hurling over the past couple of years. "That," he says "is the sort of thing we should be aiming for."

At National League level, Paul Walsh agrees that there is room for improvement in the present situation, but feels that considerable progress is being made.

On the question of money, he points to last season's decision by the management committee (which was prompted by Shelbourne) not to give compensation to clubs for lost revenue at the gate. Byrne feels that losing out once in the season for the greater good is a reasonable sacrifice to expect of a club, while Walsh makes the point that the money paid by RTE to the league will ultimately be used for the benefit of the clubs anyway and so all that is at stake is the method of distribution.