Ireland is an important route for trans-Atlantic flights

Ireland's communications regulator has advised priests of a possible link between parish radio broadcasts and static on airline pilots' radios.

ComReg spoke to priests in counties Kildare, Meath and Kilkenny about unlicensed broadcasting after being contacted by the aviation authority.

But it promised new regulations this year to enable broadcasts to resume.

A Roman Catholic spokesman said housebound people appreciated the chance to hear their local Mass.

"People like the localness of a broadcast from their own church, on Sundays and during the week as well," Fr Micheal Murphy, communications officer for the Diocese of Kildare Leighlin, told the BBC News website.

Such broadcasts, he said, had an immediacy which you did not get from state and independent radio stations, which also regularly broadcast religious services in the Irish Republic.

ComReg said it fully understood the importance of community radio services and intended permitting "wireless public address systems to meet the needs of religious and other community organisations".

Tom Butler, a ComReg spokesman, said radio interference from unlicensed broadcasters was not something new.

Belfast Airport in Northern Ireland, he told the BBC, was once affected by broadcasts from a pirate radio station in Dundalk, in the Republic.