“Anything happen last night?” I’d ask the garda who answered my call on the Bakelite phone in the newsroom of ERI (Eastcoast Radio Ireland) pirate radio station in Cork. With a cigarette lighting in an ashtray and pen poised to write down the news, I’d hope for something juicy. Sometimes you’d get a garda who would jest, saying officiously that there was a broken flower pot found in the Bishopstown area and that inquiries were ongoing.
The gardaí could be co-operative though, despite the illegal status of pirate radio. They gave us bits of local news that was important to a news team trying to build credibility. ERI started broadcasting in Ballycotton in east Cork in 1982. I joined the station in 1984 for a couple of years when, established by the O’Connor family, it was located at White’s Cross, just outside the city bounds. They also ran Progress Engineering. ERI was hugely successful but it failed to get a licence. It closed down at the end of 1988, having launched the careers of broadcasters John Creedon, Neil Prendeville and Liam Quigley.
Located in the grounds of the O’Connors’ home – which we dubbed Southfork after the ranch house in the TV series Dallas – we were relegated to Portakabins. There was one for the news team and another one for the deejays and studio. We nearly all seemed to smoke in those days, to the despair of one of my colleagues who would insist on keeping the door open, even in freezing weather. But that didn’t always work for the anti-smoker. It would take what was then unthinkable – a smoking ban – before the right to a smoke-free workplace was enshrined. Clearly, many of us at the station had outlaw tendencies.
The station broadcast 24/7. And while chart music and golden oldies were the most important part of the station’s output, those of us in the news team (at least five-strong) took ourselves kind of seriously.
This year marks Ireland’s centenary in broadcasting, since the first public radio transmission by RTÉ’s predecessor, 2RN, on January 1st, 1926. We used to rant about the national broadcaster’s “delusion” that it owned the airwaves. RTÉ Cork Local Radio was launched in 1974 (and closed down in 2000). We were at war with them. While they accused us of “lifting” news from them, we did our best to cover stories ourselves.
But often, at a press conference, we’d be kicked out. There would be the threat of a story not being reported on unless the pirates left. Competition was not welcome. We were in a catch-22 situation. But often we’d have unique items on our drivetime show. I remember interviewing The Pogues in Sir Henry’s for our “current affairs” programme, on which you could hear anything from punk rockers to right-wing moralisers campaigning against the availability of condoms.
The recessionary 1980s saw Cork badly hit with the closure of big employers, Ford and Dunlop. Nobody could stop us from interviewing people who had lost their jobs. And, God help us, ERI tried to do its populist best for the unemployed by launching an initiative, “800 Jobs for 800 People”, marking the 800th anniversary in 1985 of the granting of the original Cork City charter by Prince John.
As if recessionary gloom wasn’t enough to contend with, ERI suffered a number of setbacks. This included jamming and the unauthorised felling of the station’s transmitter mast over Christmas in 1983. Three years later its transmission facilities had to be relocated. And it had to cease FM transmissions following complaints from the national broadcaster. However, it soon returned to FM on a new frequency.
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In the 1950s, technically adept students at University College Cork were building transmitters. The first pirate station in the city to hit the headlines was Radio Juliet in June 1964. It was operated by a cousin of mine, engineer Michael Healy. He apparently would move the transmitter – built in a biscuit tin – around the city on the back of a motorbike.
My adolescent years were spent listening to Radio Luxembourg, a licensed commercial broadcaster that played all the hits and circumvented the BBC’s monopoly in the UK thanks to powerful transmitters that reached audiences across Europe.
By the 1970s, with a growing younger population’s appetite for pop music not catered for on RTÉ (until the launch of RTÉ 2FM in 1979), pirates filled the void. Radio Caroline Cork, named after the famous North Sea ship that was the soundtrack for the Swinging Sixties in the UK, went on air in 1979. It was broadcast from a caravan in Togher, a suburb of Cork. The 1970s and 1980s were a golden era for pirate radio in Cork.
The managing director of ERI was Joe O’Connor (not to be confused with the writer). He was an energetic force who, according to former schoolmates of his, was gifted the station from his parents on his 16th birthday and ran it with his mother, Kathleen.
With plenty of advertising, the more successful pirate stations were described as having “a licence to print money”. It was a heady time for deejays with mid-Atlantic accents and news teams that dared to break the stranglehold of RTÉ.