Most of the credit, or blame, is going to Ana Leddy, the head of Radio 1 and formerly a station editor at Radio Foyle, a BBC local. However, the realignment of afternoons and evenings also took place at 2FM, where Leddy has no say. Indeed, Leddy has been at her post for only four months, which in RTE terms is a heartbeat and hardly enough time to have devised and driven such extensive changes.

The architect of the changes is Adrian Moynes, who became director of RTE Radio in 2002. Previously head of TV scheduling at RTE and head of the director-general’s office, Moynes is future director-general material, with a solid reputation in the organisation for four things: intelligence, caution, likeability and self-effacement. Although he has tinkered around in the past few years, the Moynes masterplan was so long in coming that onlookers had begun to suspect there wasn’ t one.

However Eithne Hand, the former head of Radio 1, although respected, did not have the same force of personality and levels of self-belief as her surprise replacement. Nor, towards the end of her tenure, did she have the stomach to oversee a cull. So Moynes played a long game. He watched as the Dublin station NewsTalk 106 found its feet and finally obtained its quasi-national licence, before acquiring a willing gunslinger in Leddy and then declaring his hand. NewsTalk could tweak its line-up before hitting the national stage in the autumn, but Radio 1’s transformation will leave it playing catch-up.

There is a logic about the new Radio 1 schedule that is hard to fault. Particularly strong moves include giving Derek Mooney a speech-based afternoon show, appointing Mary Wilson, RTE’s legal affairs correspondent, as the anchor of the 5-8pm Drivetime, and welcoming Dave Fanning into the Radio 1 fold in a meaningful way, as cultural commissar of Drivetime’s last hour.

Mooney, Wilson and Fanning are all top-class broadcasters from diverse specialist areas who deserve the crack at the mainstream they have been offered. If Mooney’s new show, Afternoon Ireland, carries the “range of crafted feature and taped items” that RTE promises, that will enhance Radio 1’s daytime texture by reinstating a craft that has been allowed to erode.

Wilson is an exciting choice to challenge such competitors as Matt Cooper (on Today FM) and George Hook (on NewsTalk 106), and has the added advantage of helping to save the Radio 1 schedule from being overwhelmingly male-dominated. Widening the drivetime slot by effectively tacking on Dave Fanning from 7pm will considerably enhance the programme’s reach without having to match the competition’s 4.30pm start. It also rescues a quality act from a place where he had grown stale.

Among the losers, John Creedon has fared best: moving from 3.30pm to midnight, he will have the slot that he deserves. An hour of arts programming at 11pm seems like a fair trade for Rattlebag, which, while worthy, was excruciatingly dull and stuck out like a sore thumb in the middle of the afternoon.

The departure of the great Val Joyce, though enormously sad, had an air of inevitability about it. His voice, choice of music and idiosyncratic technique — freewheeling to the point of shambolic at times — combined to create a radio experience for the true connoisseur.

Similarly, it is a pity to see John Kelly’s Mystery Train shunted into oblivion, but if Radio 1 is ever to fulfil its manifest destiny — which is to become the Irish equivalent of BBC Radio 4 — then music must make way for speech.

It is mildly disturbing to see an hour of vaguely described “music features” tucked into the new schedule before Vincent Browne’s 10pm slot, but this feeds into a wider issue, one that this realignment has avoided.

The elephant in the room of RTE radio is still present — how much longer can Montrose continue to hang 2FM on the declining success of Gerry Ryan? Swapping young things about in the afternoons and evenings and re-christening Newsbeat with a laughable moniker such as 1-4-7 does not distract from the fact that 2FM has only one star, who happens to be a good deal older than its target audience of 15- to 34-year-olds.

Somewhere along the line, someone should have figured out how to move Ryan to Radio 1. But with Tubridy’s return to the flagship station, there is nowhere else in RTE radio for Ryan to go. It is wrong to imagine that the youth market will remain loyal to a pair of morning presenters — Ryan and Marty Whelan — who have a combined age of more than 100.

Pop stations grab their market in the mornings. If 2FM is serious about pursuing the youth audience, the morning schedule will have to reflect what it is attempting to achieve after lunch, which is to grow a new generation of listeners for RTE.

As things stand, the station is falling between two stools. The youth audience is adequately catered for elsewhere and is, in any case, gradually migrating to the internet as its musical medium of choice. So, why not leave them to it and devote 2FM to the 35-plus musical audience instead? Broadcasters such as Kelly would have fitted perfectly into a more mature 2FM. BBC Radio 2 performs this function in Britain, running a huge variety of specialist music shows, particularly in the evening. It also happens to be the UK’s most popular station. However, for the time being, growing up in a planned way does not appear to be an option for 2FM.

There is, of course, a third solution to the 2FM dilemma — to sell the station. In Britain, a pro-competition think tank called the European Policy Forum has recommended that the BBC sell off Radio 1 and Radio 2, effectively abandoning the popular music market to commercial rivals. In both countries, a debate is overdue about whether popular music radio still qualifies as a public service.

So for the time being, the good ships RTE Radio 1 and 2FM both sail on — the former with a limited refit, the latter with a new configuration of deckchairs and an ageing crew trying hard to be hip as the deck lists beneath their feet. Thanks to Moynes, Radio 1 finds itself in much better shape to engage the enemy, but 2FM is still steaming towards the icebergs, bizarrely convinced that it is somehow unsinkable.