Sir, – Dyrek Fay's excellent article "An instrument so powerful: the coming of television to Ireland" (Books, January 11th) reminded me of the desire for a TV service, outside of Dublin city, for rural Ireland.
Great excitement ensued when, in the mid-1960s, RTÉ located a booster station on Mount Leinster, ensuring a strong black-and-white signal from Raidió Teilifís Éireann for those living in the Midlands and especially the southeast of the country.
An appetite developed for multichannel viewing, and during the 1980s a cable service operated in Waterford city, but not for those living outside of it. We relied on an illegal deflector system situated on a hilly site between Dunmore East and Woodstown. Mostly it relayed HTV, a Welsh station.
Similar deflector systems sprouted up in other parts of Ireland. Political pressure grew to have these deflector systems made legal and government minster Conor Cruise O’Brien counter-proposed that RTÉ would relay BBC Northern Ireland, so that everyone could have access to the BBC’s world-famous news service and other programmes.
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The proposal was dropped, and we had to wait many years for satellite TV services to supply us with the channels that we take for granted today. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL C O’CONNOR,
Waterford.