Clare FM

This is one of the quieter entries in Ireland's listing, at 60 of 75. Stations at this depth are usually community, religious or single genre broadcasters rather than national networks, and the country's numbered pages are the only route to them.

The open count against Clare FM is one, which is enough to know the stream has been played through the directory and not enough to compare it with anything. Small counts are the normal case out here, and a ranking built from them separates stations by luck as much as by interest.

No language is recorded against this station. The field is optional in the public directory and a great many entries skip it, so an empty language says nothing about what you will hear when you press play. It does keep the station off the language shelves, since a shelf built on guesses would be worse than a shelf with holes.

Its audio comes from playerservices.streamtheworld.com. Four other stations in Ireland stream from the same host, which is a smaller sharing than the big platforms and often means the same people run them all.

The station's own site is clare.fm. The .fm domain has nothing to do with FM radio or with where a station is: it belongs to the Federated States of Micronesia and has been sold to broadcasters worldwide for years, so read it as branding rather than as a location.