The US Library of Congress Transcript on Irish Pirate Radio Archiving

 This is a transcript of my lecture delivered to the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference in 2022 delivered to the US Library of Congress in Washington DC

Ireland has had a colourful relationship with illegal broadcasting. During the iconic events of the 1916 Easter Rising, the rebels ensured Ireland became the first nation in the world to be declared by radio on their own pirate station. that was 107 years ago this week.

 

In my book ‘A Century of Irish Radio’, I have listed almost 1,800 pirate RADIO stations that have at one time broadcast on our small island from 1916 to present. We’ve seen sectarian pirate stations in Belfast incite violence and direct PARAMILITARIES TO MURDER live on air. We’ve had border blasters broadcasting into Northern Ireland from the South STEALING LISTENERS AND REVENUE FROM UK LICENSED STATIONS and we’ve had pirate RADIO buccaneers earning millions from pirate broadcasting. We’ve seen police raids, street protests, misuse by gangland criminals to sell drugs and unfortunately as a haven for paedophiles. We’ve seen pirate radio of all genres, sizes and even pirate television leading to political change. It’s created media stars, who still grace the airwaves today having got their start in pirate radio and PIARTE RADIO HAS created its own unique place in Irish history.

 

In almost every nation of the world, illegal broadcasters have made their mark. They have been referred to as clandestine, offshore, bootleg or simply pirate radio. They have affected change, this includes legislative change, social change or simply exposing their listeners to a new genre of music. In Ireland, after decades of an uninspired State monopoly with a single channel, from the nineteen sixties onwards, illegal broadcasters demonstrated their engineering expertise with homemade transmitters and exposed a need and desire for alternative radio.

 

This led in the nineteen eighties to a golden era of illegal broadcasting that challenged the State. A plethora of pirate stations, as many as 150 on any given weekend, exposed the need for change and an appetite for radio. Some of these stations became known as super pirates using imported strong powerful FM transmitters with slick American style programming, garnering millions of euros in advertising. An out of date law dating back to the foundation of the State in 1926 was found to be full of loopholes with the maximum fine of just £50, equivalent to one 3 sec ad on Radio Nova, who by 1983 was one of the most popular pirates with a 70% listener rating in Dublin. This allied with the political instability of the nineteen eighties, with numerous changes of Government, it was not until 1988, when new stiffer anti-pirate laws were introduced and an alternative Independent commercial legal network was established for both radio and television, did the issue of pirate radio abate. Pirate broadcasting continues to this day but it has returned to the hobby and occasional weekend broadcasts, mainly for genres like dance and garage music not aired on national or local radio.

 

Without pirate radio especially in Dublin, you may never have heard of U2. When they produced their first four track demo tape, the national broadcaster would have no airtime for them but pirate stations such as Capital Radio and Big D Radio, where in 1978 the band gave their first radio interview. they plugged this up an coming band forcing the national broadcaster to take notice and as they say the rest is history.

 

But what of that golden era, a period from 1978 to 1988, that changed the Irish radio landscape? How did an official Irish Pirate Radio Archive come into existence? Why and what was the importance of those stations? Were these broadcasters and the associated industry around those stations to be consigned to history? Forgotten? Was their impact on the broadcasting and social history of Ireland to be ignored? How would future generations of scholars analyse and report on these stations especially as the years moved on. There were a number of fanzines and two web sites that covered the Irish pirate radio scene. The most comprehensive one was the DX archive, run by Ian Biggar, Gary Hogg and Ken Baird but they were based in Scotland and they made tours of Ireland recording and photographing stations but they could only do so much. Then John Fleming began his Radiowaves site. There were two magazines in the Eighties, ‘Anoraks Ireland’ which had replaced the Free Radio Campaign’s ‘Sounds Alternative’ that was dedicated to the pirates of the 70s, and the Blackpool based Anoraks UK, who could monitor many of the east coast of Ireland stations across the Irish Sea. When the pirate era ended, apart from the DX archive it all stopped. While I admire and we as a radio history community are thankful for the DX Archive in Scotland, surely, we the Irish could do better. After a trip to a radio conference in Luxembourg and at the back of a bus returning from the Europe 1 transmissions site, myself, Brian Greene and John Walsh had a meaningful discussion as to how we should try to preserve Irish radio history and in particular pirate history.

 

currently The State broadcaster has an archive department but they have expensively monetized its use. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland provides funding for radio archiving through a fund, but at present it’s not available to archiving pirate radio. At its launch in 2013 they said,

quote ‘the scheme seeks to contribute to the preservation of Ireland’s broadcasting heritage by supporting the development of an archiving culture in the Irish broadcasting sector’. Unquote

In a report in 2017 it reported,

Quote ‘It is generally understood there is a maximum ten years left within which to save the global analogue broadcast material collection. The race against time is compounded by – Degradation of material and diminished expertise to do the job.’ Unquote

To dispel that notion, the work we have been carrying out are archives dating back over 40 years. From 2013 to 2017 just 14 projects shared €5million in grants and  it said that these supported the historical and cultural value of the broadcast material archived.

 

This then is my personal journey, a road map perhaps for others to follow to archive pirate radio. In June 2017, I organised a meeting in a Dublin pub to find common ground with fellow Irish radio anoraks with a view to the setting up the grand idea of a possible pirate radio museum. This had followed a six part TV series for Dublin Community Television where I interviewed many of those who had been involved in Dublin pirate radio.

 

A year later I embarked on a nationwide tour with an exhibition to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the 1988 Wireless Telegraphy Act and the creation of the independent sector. The exhibition had a two-fold ambition, firstly to draw attention to the significant role in both radio and social history terms that pirate radio had contributed to the broadcasting landscape in Ireland and secondly to seek out the avalanche of valuable archives that remained in private hands. These archives, from many of those who worked in pirate radio, would help to draw a more complete picture of the colossus impact illegal broadcasting had made on the Irish radio landscape.

 

I hoped to educate a new generation of scholars as to the breadth and depth of these illegal broadcasters. I aimed to gather as much memorabilia both audio and physical of the period . The exhibits initially consisted of my own personal collection and small collections donated to me including those of the late Alan MacSimion. One of the centre pieces of the exhibition was a pirate radio transmitter built in a biscuit tin by the late Sean McQuillan in Monaghan which was used by the writer Pat McCabe (Breakfast on Pluto etc) for his pirate station Radio Butty.

 

The response and interest was overwhelmingly positive, a real sense of nostalgia.  I visited Tallaght (the first exhibition), Cork, Waterford, Dungarvan, Limerick, Galway, Carlow and at Dublin City where it became the centre of press attention when one of the candidates in the then Irish Presidential election and former pirate broadcaster Gavan Duffy visited the exhibition. As an amateur radio historian and curator, I realised quickly that the donated material required expert curation, storage and digitisation. With the assistance and guidance of David Meehan and Mark O’Brien at the media and history departments of Dublin City University, the Irish Pirate Radio Archive was created and opened at the Glasnevin based University. This would be a unique archive in a university setting, as pirate radio is a global phenomenon. The media launch took place at a press conference chaired by former broadcaster Stuart Clark at Buswells Hotel in the shadow of the Irish parliament building.

 

This was followed by another unique event held at the Ballsbridge Hotel, an oral history day. Organized by John Walsh and Brian Greene of radio.ie, the two men had set up the Irish Pirate Radio Audio Archive through their excellent pirate.ie. Over one hundred of those who found themselves involved in and launched careers through pirate radio attended the event and had their experiences recorded. The authorities at DCU had felt that they would be unable both in terms of space and finances to offer a home to the audio element of the donations.

 

Another curator of Irish pirate history is John Fleming at radiowaves.fm. John was an early pirate curator before taking a personal break but returning with a new and improved radiowaves.fm. Like those I have mentioned already, as fans of Irish pirate radio, our go to fanzine in the nineteen eighties to keep up with station activities was ‘Anoraks Ireland’ created and run by Paul Davidson. Paul not only amassed a massive collection of photographs, rate cards, press clippings and publicity material from the many hundreds of pirates that at one time cluttered the Irish airwaves, but he also recorded thousands of hours of broadcasts across Ireland. This was a unique and invaluable collection documenting the diversity and activity of pirate stations.

 

However, when the pirates closed in 1988 and were replaced by the independent commercial sector, Paul, for want of a better description disappeared suddenly from the scene and this unique collection seemed lost. There were no more fanzines, no more recordings for sale and no further response from correspondence with the Anoraks Ireland address. There was speculation, especially with the advent of social media, that he had moved house and that his collection was put in a skip, perhaps he had moved out of the country or worst of all had he passed away without getting the recognition for his contribution to reporting on pirate radio history. At various pirate radio enthusiast gatherings, there would be the question ‘what happened to Paul?’ followed by speculation and a regret that this collection was lost.

 

it seemed important that I at least tried to detect what had happened to both Paul and his collection.  What followed, after getting advice from a private detective friend on how to trace missing people, was a detective story worthy of Sherlock Holmes. Eventually my hard work and many dead ends paid off and at Christmas 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, I elicited a response. Paul was alive and well, living still in Dublin but more importantly still had his collection. After numerous telephone conversations, explaining to Paul what we were doing, how important his extensive collection would be, he agreed to donate his entire collection to the Irish Pirate Radio Archive.

 

I made three trips with my daughter to his residence and collected a treasure trove of material. The physical memorabilia consisting of advertising rate cards, over 5,000 photographs, press clippings, press releases and employment contracts goes to DCU in Glasnevin, with the thousands of tapes to be divided and digitised by pirate.ie, radiowaves.fm and the UK based DX Archive. These tapes are now being made available to the public, along with background stories and context on the three websites. paul died suddenly on christmas day last year.

 

As a voluntary effort, this is unique in the protection of invaluable archives in Ireland and immense credit must go to the archivists at the three sites. Media academics and students owe them a huge debt of thanks for their honest endeavours in the often time consuming digitization of C60 and C90 tapes sometimes having deteriorated over the many decades since they were recorded. Some of these recordings are now a half century old. But the work doesn’t stop there are we try to gather the strands of a complicated and colourful history of Irish pirate radio together. I acknowledge those anoraks who collected personal archives and memorabilia and managed to keep these safe over the years and have now generously donated them, never easy to part with something so personal. Further donations have come from both North and South of the Irish border. Unity in pirate radio.

 

Hopefully we can encourage both professional and amateur radio historians across the world to not ignore the valuable contribution of illegal broadcasters. Many countries have had pirate radio whether simply for music, in support of causes or political pirates and these have generated free radio campaigns in Germany, France, Canada, Australia and even here in the United States and these should be remembered, catalogued and recorded. It is vital to have a greater understanding of the need for, the contribution of and the scale of pirate radio across the world.

 

For us. pirate radio shone a light on dull, dark Ireland and for that as a nation we should be thankful and praise the contribution of all those pirate broadcasters across Ireland who have made a difference.