The Introduction to 'A Century of Irish Radio 1900 - 2000' by Eddie Bohan on Sale Now

A CENTURY OF IRISH RADIO  1900- 2000

1.               The Introduction

2.               In the Beginning

3.               Rebel Radio

4.               The Fledgling Twenties

5.               The Evolutionary Thirties

6.               The Troublesome Forties

7.               The Flat Fifties

8.               The Swinging Sixties

9.               The Sensational Seventies

10.            The Revolutionary Eighties

11.            The Celtic Tiger Nineties

12.            Northern Ireland Legal and Illegal

13.            Appendix

While every attempt has been made by the author to be as accurate as possible, because of the nature of some illegal radio broadcast activities some of the facts are open to interpretation and are open to correction for future editions. Contact theirishbroadcastinghalloffame@gmail.com

The history of Irish radio broadcasting in the twentieth century is one of invention, innovation, creativity, world’s firsts, criminality, fraud and death yet with a little sprinkling of humour. From the very early experiments of Marconi, to the momentous events of the 1916 Easter Rising and the first embers of propaganda broadcasting, the playing of the music of the savages, the delivery of local deaths announcements on radio to wartime broadcasts, paramilitary broadcasts and pirate radio, Irelands radio colourful radio landscape has one hell of a story to tell. The following pages is full of political intrigue, state and church interference, law breaking, madness and sadness as the Irish airwaves have created, reflected and reported social, political and economic change in Ireland for over a century.

In times of war and strife it was a consoling constant companion, in peace it helped drive the agenda of change, created debate and as news delivery fragments with a tsunami of technological advances, radio has maintained a unique, dominant position to shape Ireland in the twenty first century at home and abroad.    

From the single goal of independence and the launch of a broadcasting monopoly, this small island nation on the edge of Europe in the Atlantic has evolved into a multi cultural society with a multitude of radio stations. Many of the stories that follow are full of endeavour, hilarity, violent threats and challenges to the state. The ingenuity of using discarded scraps to create living breathing transmitters, the launching of border blasters and the hundreds of broadcasters both legal and illegal who have been contributing to the natural resource of the ether and Irish solutions to Irish problems.

Following the closure of a Dublin pirate radio station, the engineer who built the station’s transmitter had not been paid for his work.  He enlisted the assistance of another pirate broadcaster to recover equipment he believed was rightfully his. As his policeman father waited patiently outside in the car, the two men illegally entered the property to retrieve the equipment. The station owner arrived at the house brandishing a shotgun this despite the presence of a policeman outside his door. In this bizarre scene from a Hollywood movie, the trespassers were eventually allowed repossess the equipment.

The ether of the radio airwaves carry not only news and entertainment broadcasts but this natural resource also allows pilots communicate with Dublin air traffic control, allows ships to safely berth in Irish ports, allows secure Garda communications to keep our nation safe, provides Irish troops with communications to perform their duties at home and abroad, enables house bound citizens to take a moment out of their lives to listen to Mass from their local churches and truckers communicating along Irish motorways on CB radio.

Important Editors Note:

This is the story of the century 1900 – 2000 and does not include the stories of those stations and broadcasters that have aired since 2000 to present

The Introduction

From 1926 until 1989 broadcasting in the Republic of Ireland was a legal monopoly. On January 1^st1926 2RN officially went on air in Dublin transitioning over the decades into Radio Athlone, Radio Eireann and as it is today Radio Telifis Eireann following the addition in December 1961 of a single television channel. In 1989 new legislation broke that monopoly with the introduction of legal commercial broadcasting. Despite a seemingly slow route towards deregulation, Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century and mainly due to its location as an island on the edge of Europe was at the forefront of wireless broadcasting. One of the men who was credited with the invention of radio Guigelmo Marconi used Ireland as a hub to make contact with the expanding world of North America. In 1916 Ireland made a failed bid to free itself from British rule but then a subsequent successful War of Independence and a civil war stifled the development of the radio industry and technological advances left Ireland in its wake.

Ireland had fallen behind most of Europe as radio broadcasting and the associated technology advanced. It would be one of the last countries in Western Europe to open its own domestic radio station and use up the resources of the airwaves. This was all the more unusual as Ireland and those who fought for its freedom had shown innovative and foresight when using the new medium of radio to disseminate their message during the 1916 Easter Rising. The station launched by the rebels was in the truest sense the world’s first pirate radio station and it would later be ironic that pirate radio would dominate the history of Irish Broadcasting.

While wounds from a civil war (1922-23) took many generations to heal, a younger nation emerged and this youthful population demanded more from the national State broadcaster but a lack of leadership within and from Government the choice of listening remained static. The authorities relied on the effectiveness of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and the 1926 Wireless Telegraphy Act to control the airwaves. This Act was used in 1936 to prosecute a Limerick based pirate radio station. During the Second World War, Ireland remained neutral but those opposed to the political settlement with Britain that created the Irish Free State in 1922 sought to aid the Axis powers by declaring war on Britain. The IRA, as their predecessors had done in 1916 sought assistance from Germany and while not officially pro-German the IRA was most certainly anti-British. The Irish Government did not know that German sympathisers were using Ireland as a base to spy on British army and naval movements and that these reports were being transmitted from Dublin to Berlin. The same transmitting equipment was then used to broadcast IRA propaganda to a wider audience. The British were asked to supply detecting equipment and the search for the pirate broadcasters led to the creation of G2 the Irish army’s intelligence department. The broadcasters were caught and imprisoned but one of the men sacrificed his life on hunger strike while in jail.

Technological advances especially after the Second World War allowed experimenters to build cheap yet effect broadcast transmitters. In the late 1950’s political pirate radio stations emerged but these were haphazard and short lived. The freedom of the 1960’s and the creation of global communications made the world smaller but Ireland’s and its leaders especially Eamon DeValera had a very insular protective view of their nation. The grandson of an Easter Rising veteran Ronan O’Rahilly would try to break the dominance of the BBC in the UK with the launch of Radio Caroline. Pop music for the younger generation was now at hand. Inexpensive transistor radios allowed Caroline to go on the move with their listeners while their parents sat around the fireplace with their large Pye or Bush radios afixture in the living room. In the so-called swinging sixties small pirate radio stations began to appear on the Irish airwaves playing American artists rather than showband and Irish traditional music as heard on the State broadcaster. The stations were hampered by a limited radius using homemade transmitters and broadcast sporadically for an hour or two mainly on Sundays.