Robbie Robinson at the Portmarnock studios on the day of the raid (courtesy Gary Hogg & Ian Biggar).
This is a recording of Sunshine Radio from the 18th of May 1983 from 1722-1738 recorded from 531 kHz AM. The presenter is Eugene Higgins. News headlines at 5.30 are read by Emer Dolan (Woodful) and refer to the Radio Nova raid that morning and plans by the opposition Fianna Fáil party to press once again for legislation on local radio. The following morning Sunshine Radio would itself be raided and put off the air.
Sunshine engineer the late Peter Gibney works on a new AM transmitter after the main one is confiscated in the raid. Photo courtesy of Gary Hogg/Ian Biggar.
This recording is from the Skywave Tapes Collection. Skywave Radio International broadcast a shortwave station in the 1980s from Baldoyle in northeast Dublin.
Declan Meehan and John Walsh at East Coast FM in Bray where Declan has worked since 1994.
In the second part of our extended interview, long-time broadcaster Declan Meehan discusses his move from Sunshine to Radio Nova in 1982 which was by then the biggest station in Dublin. He tells us how Chris Cary copied the sound of KIIS FM in Los Angeles to bring a new broadcasting style to Ireland. Despite his love for Radio Nova, Declan left the station because of the bitter NUJ strike in 1984. Although he moved into licensed radio in the UK and Ireland after that, Declan’s involvement with the pirates didn’t quite end there. The interview concludes with Declan’s thoughts on the pirate legacy and his views on the state of radio today.
You can hear the first part of this interview here.
Declan Meehan and John Walsh at the studios of East Coast FM in Bray, where Declan has worked since 1994.
We met one of Ireland’s most experienced broadcasters Declan Meehan recently to discuss his significant contribution to Irish pirate radio history and Irish radio in general over the past 50 years.
In the first part of a long interview, Declan discusses the early years of his involvement in the Dublin pirate scene spanning small stations such as Radio Vanessa and Radio Milinda and larger, more professional operations like ARD. He describes his unhappy move to the new RTÉ Radio 2 in 1979 and how he went on to work for the first of the superpirates, Sunshine Radio, where he met Chris Cary.
The interview includes references to many of the best-known names in Irish radio over the past half-century.
In 1986, three large pirate stations – Sunshine Radio in Dublin, ERI in Cork and ABC in Waterford – co-operated to jointly organise a 250-mile maxi-marathon between the three cities.
Here are two promos – the first from ERI and the second from ABC – voiced by Mark Byrne of Sunshine Radio. They are fascinating on so many levels: co-operation between pirate stations, a campaign backed by big commercial sponsors and funds raised going to a major charity, the Central Remedial Clinic.
This is a good example of how the archive can give us a more global view of what was happening in the 1980s. Listeners to each station did not know that all three stations were involved but the archive can tell us that. Arguably the level of co-operation surpasses what exists today between stations in the same large radio groups.
It also reminds us that despite often fierce local competition, stations from different parts of the country were willing to co-operate for charitable causes. No doubt they also had an eye to the impeding legalisation and wanted to position themselves as socially responsible.
These clips are based on recordings from the Leon Tipler Tapes Collection and the Skywave Tapes Collection.
