Are Spirit Radio in serious breach of their licence ?

The "CB" spectrum concerned 27.6-28MHz was NEVER legal for CB use in ROI so a consultation would have been nonsensical from their point of view. This encompassed the original (1981) UK legal CB band, the UK decided to come up with a different unique CB band (with Narrow Band FM/ NBFM) rather than adopt the original American 40 channels CB band on lower '27MHz' frequencies, as some other countries in Europe had done. Part of the reasons may have been done to try and stimulate UK manufacturing of CBs ? Eventually, years later, the UK also allowed the 'international' 40 channels band too. Using 27.6-28MHz meant UK CB gear could easily be adapted to this licensed Irish church radio system (and was to an extent already in use for that purpose without licences)

the 27MHz Church Radio licensing system introduced in Ireland in 2006 was referred to by comreg as Wireless Public Address System (WPAS) , however very few churches nationwide using radio actually got these licences.

A much better dedicated system for Church Radio would have been to give a small bit of the 76-87 MHz spectrum for 'Church Broadcasts' using high quality regular FM radio band deviation, but no need for stereo. This bit of spectrum had a massive decline and exit of business 2-way radio users due to switching to mobile phone providers instead. So it could have easily been worked around without affecting the few remaining users. Due to just localized VHF coverage and good capture effect with mono FM, only a small pool of frequencies would have done fine and would have been a worthwhile new use of spectrum abandoned by other users.

Obviously a ready made cheap source of suitable receivers from variety of manufacturers would have been any radio capable of receiving the Japanese FM band.

The audio quality would have been much better than 27MHz NBFM, which would have also helped elderly users who may also have been hard of hearing.

However this is probably academic/historic now with streaming of church services taking off in such a big way during 'Covid'

Some parts went to replace bits and pieces on the old 252 units; itself has been replaced with a more modern unit. I believe that some components were sold on to other MW users to keep them on the road; most of the rest has since been dispensed with and scrapped. There's a huge amount of scrap metal involved in these transmissers; they are pretty much warehouse sized units.

567 khz is a better frequency than 612 khz

I wonder is the Carrigroe mast for Spirit AM Radio still standing? its been off for months now. I'm sure this service have also been discontinued.

It's meets the needs of the audience of which you don't seem to be one.

There are plenty of evangelicals in Ireland. They may be a minority but they do exist and have been here for many generations, centuries in fact (I'm RC, just to clear thing up).

I haven't listened to Spirit in a while, I got fed up with the constant skipping of the audio.

I do know that Premier Christian Radio in the UK (nationwide on DAB, also on AM in the Greater London Area) sell airtime to like-minded US-based stations who are of course well-familiar with AM but haven't the vaguest idea what DAB even is. So it may be possible that Spirit is doing something similar by having a presence on AM if only on paper. Not that I heard any US preachers on the station in recent times...

There are quiet a few but their audience would also include some from the main denominations.

Yes 549kHz is gone it seems, and I don't think all of the FM transmitters are working either, one example where I live is the 88.00 MHZ Castleisland and Tralee area. I feel that frequently is supposed to be blank anyway, there's nothing on it anywhere.

Wasn't there an alternative bidder for this licence?

Is there a process that allows the licence to be withdrawn and re advertised?

I doubt Ofcom would have been so lenient here.

Carrickroe is STILL OFF ? Two years and counting? It's still listed on their website, I guess they are probably waiting for Lecky prices to fall further.

There were off in mid Kerry 88.0 FM, the signal was so weak it wasn't worth it, you have to be 1km radius of the transmission site.

US fundamentalists. There was a charity called something along the lines of "towers for christ" that raised funds to pay for proselytising radio stations outside the US; and they'd get direct donations too.

I suspect they're getting their studio facilities FOC and likely don't pay m/any of the staff either; so its just transmission costs that need to be covered (those are definitely not donated by the operators)