The Early Days
In 1990, Liam Mackey conducted an extensive interview for a cover story of Hot Press, which ran in two parts in successive issues of the magazine. Here is a short but illuminating exchange on the origins of modern Irish radio!
Liam Mackey, 19 May 2010
THE PIRATE DAYS
How did you actually get involved with pirate radio?
It was through Mark Storey that I got to know a number of people who were involved in pirate radio – fellows like Robbie Irwin who subsequently went on to be a programmer at Century, Declan Meehan who went on to become an RTÉ presenter and subsequently a Century presenter, Dave Kelly...all these names which by now have become almost legend in the radio business here. They were all involved in setting up splinter groups because the radio business in those days was, well, it was more political than South Africa (laughs). You had all these break-away groups – Radio Dublin gave rise to Alternative Radio Dublin and then came Big D and so on. As a result of that you had the whole Bonnie and Clyde/Laurel and Hardy scenarios of people stealing each others’ transmitters, of certain individuals offering you money to throw a bucket of water on your own transmitter, of having to steal equipment when you were leaving because you weren’t getting paid – all of that. Anyway I worked for ARD and Big D radio as a rock show disc jockey – it was back then that I met Dave Fanning.
As regards the politics of the pirate scene and the kind of warfare that ensued – did it get hairy?
Well, you were dealing with people who treated it primarily as a business. Now there were also a number of very dedicated, very serious broadcasters, guys who were brought up on the Radio Caroline tradition and they loved what they were doing, they’d do it for nothing and, God love them, a lot of them did and they were badly ripped-off and where are they today? But the purse-strings were being controlled by businessmen and some of these businessmen were not particularly savoury people. They had to come from backgrounds where they had to fight hard to make their mark and they were still doing it in the radio business. So it was ostensibly quite a glamorous job, but behind the scenes, it was not glamorous by any stretch of the imagination.
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