A Radio West flyer from its days on 765 kHz (courtesy Ian Biggar).
This is the final edition of the popular weekly Radio West Anoraks’ Show a short time before the station’s closure at the end of 1988. Broadcast from Mullingar every Sunday morning, the programme was fronted by station boss Shaun Coyne and a variety of presenters including the late Don Allen, himself a veteran of the offshore stations. Both Shaun and Don are heard on this show along with Willie Harte, Michael Tiernan, Gerry Reilly, John Gartlan, Myles Johnson and Eddie Caffrey. There’s plenty of nostalgia about the pirate era that is about to end and speculation about the new legal regime due to come into effect. Essential listening!
This programme was recorded from 1053-1145 on Sunday 18th December 1988 from 100.1 FM and has been donated kindly by John Breslin.
A small part of the enormous Anoraks Ireland Collection as photographed by Eddie Bohan.
Anoraks Ireland was a one-stop resource for Irish radio enthusiasts of the 1980s and early 1990s allowing them to buy or swap cassette recordings and other materials relating to the hundreds of pirate radio stations that existed back then. The organisation extensively documented the unique golden era of pirate radio in the form of photographs, magazines, detailed bandscans, station surveys and much more.
Earlier this year, Anoraks Ireland founder Paul Davidson agreed to donate his vast collection of Irish radio materials to the Irish Pirate Radio Archive at Dublin City University. The materials, primarily from the pirate radio era of the 80s, offer a fascinating insight into the Irish broadcasting landscape of the time and consist of thousands of cassette recordings, photos of DJs, studios and transmitter sites, advertising rate cards, newspaper cuttings along with lots of other materials. The Irish Pirate Radio Archive, in association with ourselves at Pirate.ie and with Radiowaves.fm, are in the process of digitising the huge collection and are about to start archiving it across the three websites. We all look forward to making this invaluable collection available to historians, students and visitors to our websites. The digitisation teams are John Walsh and Brian Greene of Pirate.ie, Eddie Bohan of the Irish Pirate Radio Archive and Irish Broadcasting Hall of Fame and John Fleming of Radiowaves.fm.
Original label of this recording in the Anoraks Ireland Collection.
We kick off with recordings of Cork super-pirate ERI from 1456-1542 on Thursday 3rd November 1988. On air are Pamela Wilson, previously of WLS in Galway and Radio West in Mullingar, and Joe Reilly on news. These were recorded from 97.7 FM in stereo and ERI also broadcast on 1305 kHz (announcing 225 metres). The recording above runs from 1456-1542 and the one below from 1543-1629.
2nd part of Pamela Wilson recording.
These recordings are from the Anoraks Ireland Collection, donated to us by Paul Davidson.
West National Radio 3 sticker from 1988 (courtesy DX Archive).
This is a recording of part the Anoraks Show on West National Radio 3 from December 1988, towards the end of the popular show’s run as the pirates prepared to close down. Station boss Shaun Coyne interviews radio engineer Gerry Reilly from Co. Cavan, who reckons that he set up between 30 and 40 pirate stations in the 1980s.
Shaun Coyne pictured in 1986 (photo by Andy Carter, courtesy of Ian Biggar).
The discussion gives a fascinating insight into the economics and technology of the pirates and there are nuggets of information about how certain stations made big profits and provided much needed work in their areas. There’s also plenty of speculation about the new licensed era in 1989. Following the Anoraks Show we hear part of the final edition of the weekly farming programme Landlink.
This recording was made from 1052-1141 on Sunday 11th December 1988 from 100.1 FM. We thank John Breslin for the donation. Listen to our own interview with Gerry Reilly in 2018 here.
Landlink was heard after the Anoraks Show on Radio West every Sunday (courtesy Ian Biggar).
One of the presenters of the Radio West Anoraks Show was the late Don Allen, himself a veteran of the offshore pirate scene and an accomplished broadcaster on the Irish pirates of the 1980s. Here he is presenting the Anoraks Show in 1987 with station boss Shaun Coyne, who talks about the station’s expansion into Galway on both AM and FM. There are adverts for Anoraks Ireland and Anoraks UK and discussion of a pirate radio magazine that was being prepared at the time, although it seems it never materialised.
This recording was made from 1045-1145 on Sunday 19th July 1987 from an unspecified FM frequency. It was donated to us by Ian Biggar.
Radio West compliments slip from c. 1986 (courtesy DX Archive).
Radio West broadcast from Mullingar from 1982 until the end of 1988 and achieved wide coverage after it began using the former Radio Nova 10kW transmitter on 765 kHz and later 702 kHz. It was popular with radio watchers because of the lively and often unpredictable Sunday morning Anoraks Show presented by station owner Shaun Coyne and others. A diet of radio gossip, colourful rumours and regular updates from anoraks throughout the country made the show essential listening each week.
This edition of the Anoraks Show was recorded in Dublin from 765 kHz from 1100-1230 on 8th June 1986 and features Philip Hilton with Shaun Coyne. There’s a promise of link-ups with ABC in Waterford and WKLR in Cork but these don’t materialise and the presenters joke that these stations are blacklisted! The Anoraks Show is followed at midday by the first half hour of the traditional music programme Céilí Lár Tíre.
This recording is from the Skywave Tapes Collection. Skywave Radio International broadcast a shortwave station in the 1980s from Baldoyle in northeast Dublin.
