An Irishman's Diary

THE Louth village of Greenore, which we mentioned here yesterday, has an unusual claim to fame among Irish sea ports. I dare say it may even be unique. Because, although other Irish ports have sent pirates to sea down the centuries – most notably the west-coast haunts of Grainuaile – the pirates who launched from Greenore in the 1960s were a fundamentally different variety.

It wasn’t the sea they were primarily interested in, although water was always central to their operations. The real target was the other waves Britannia ruled at the time: the ones in the air. Hibernia ruled some of them too, as did the governments of many European countries in those days before independent radio stations. And it was to be from a former Danish ferry, refitted as a radio ship in Greenore, that the attack against state broadcasting monopolies was mounted.

Record company monopolies were also a target. For the man behind the Greenore venture, Ronan O’Rahilly, a musical manager then representing a young star called Georgie Fame, they too were part of the problem. To wit: he couldn’t get his man’s records played either on the BBC, or on the BBC’s early commercial rival, Radio Luxembourg.

The latter’s pop shows were sponsored by the big labels: which, paying the piper, called the tunes. So O’Rahilly decided to set up his own station to broadcast in Britain. And this not being legally possible on land then (Radio Luxembourg was hosted by another European state, met its laws, and had powerful transmitters), the solution was to go offshore.

O’Rahilly’s ship sailed from Louth in 1964 and was soon a source of major annoyance to the British government. When Tony Benn changed the law to make offshore broadcasting in British waters illegal too, the station just moved operations to the Netherlands.

And so, through various changes of owner and ships, but always with the same name, continued a decades-long guerrilla broadcasting campaign.

When I first became aware of Radio Caroline, in the late 1970s, it had evolved into a station that played album music. By then you could hear all the hit singles (except the occasional banned one, like the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen) on BBC’s Radio 1. But if you liked Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, Radio Caroline was often where you had to go.

It only added to the station’s romance that it broadcast from a ship in the North Sea. And the challenges involved were dramatically highlighted when, one night in 1980, the vessel sank; more or less live on air. Happily, the DJ, technical crew, and even a pet canary named after the former British prime minister, Harold Wilson, were all rescued before the vessel went under.

The station’s name, at least, was eventually refloated, and although it almost disappeared again in the 1990s, it was once more revived and is still broadcasting today, on land now and legally, if with much reduced reach. You can get it on the internet and, in parts of Ireland, via the UPC television cable.

Meanwhile, the battle for the airwaves continues, if also in much reduced form. The station is currently campaigning for the use of a medium wavelength, 648 Kilohertz, vacated by the BBC. Supporters hope Radio Caroline can secure it in time for the 2014 anniversary, when it will be 50 years since the pioneering fathers sailed from Greenore.

THE O’RAHILLY NAME will also feature in an even bigger anniversary later this decade. Literally that name, since “The O’Rahilly” is what the radio station founder’s paternal grandfather called himself. And although he may or may not have met the old Gaelic criteria for so doing, he was famously granted a posthumous licence for it by WB Yeats:

Sing of the O’Rahilly,/Do not deny his right;/Sing a ‘the’ before his name;/allow that he, despite/

All those learned historians,/ Established it for good;/

He wrote out that word himself/He christened himself with blood.

The poem was inspired by the farewell note O’Rahilly wrote as he lay dying in a doorway off Moore Street in 1916. A senior member of the Irish Citizen Army but not of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, he had been actively opposed to the Rising and so was not included in the plans.

But when he heard it was going ahead anyway, he decided to join his estranged comrades in the GPO. Or as Yeats had him say on arrival: “Because I helped to wind the clock/I come to hear it strike.” It duly struck, and as he knew it would, ended in failure. Then, on the Friday of Easter Week, he was trying to lead a group of volunteers away from the burning post office when they were machine-gunned. The note he scrawled, saying goodbye to his wife and children, ended with the words: “It was a good fight anyhow.”

More than three decades later, one of those children would buy the Great Northern Railway’s properties in Greenore, after the train line there closed. It was thus from the only privately-owned port in Ireland that, another decade and generation later, a piece of broadcasting history was made.

There was a certain irony in the family’s involvement. Post-independence, the same GPO had been the headquarters of Ireland’s State broadcaster, for more than 30 years until the 1960s. The winds of change were blowing by then. And although RTÉ was not the main target of the ship that left Greenore in 1964, it would certainly be damaged in the crossfire.