The history books tell us that the forerunner of RTE Radio One, 2RN began broadcasting on January 1st 1926. The callsign 2RN had been assigned to the new Irish broadcasting station by the British post office but 2RN was not the first applied for callsign and the Little Denmark Street based station was not the first application of the 2RN callsign.
In 1924[1] when negotiations were taking place as to whether a new Irish Free State radio station should be a commercial enterprise or a state run monopoly, a Dail wireless committee heard that a group of five companies led by Andrew Belton’s Industrial Developments Limited had coalesced into the Irish Broadcasting Company. The IBC was to apply for the licence as a commercial station but a political scandal involving Belton and a committee member Darrell Figgis led to the decision to be taken that the Irish station would be state run. In anticipation of obtaining a licence, Belton applied to the British Post Office for the callsign 4RN[2] as in ‘For Erin’ but at the time there was no callsigns with the number 4 designation. Instead, the British Post Office allocated the callsign 2RN as in ‘come back TO Erin’ instead.
The issue initially was
that there was already a wireless operator with the callsign 2RN. It had been
assigned to David Daniel Richards, a resident at ‘Mametz House,’ 36 Bontnewydd
Terrace in Trelewis, Glamorgan, Wales. Richards was a demobbed British soldier
after the First World War who had acquired wireless operator knowledge at the
front. To allow for the Irish station to use his callsign, in 1924 his callsign
slightly changed to 2 ARN.
[1]
Maurice Gorham’s ’40 Years of Irish Radio’.
[2]
The 4RN callsign would later be used by a Queensland radio station.
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