Documentary tunes into Donegal’s 1980s pirate radio stations

I may have spent many years working with the BBC and other international broadcasters, but I owe my successful media career to pirate radio stations in Ireland and notably Donegal in the 1980s.

For about a decade unlicensed broadcasters disrupted the Irish media landscape by flooding the airwaves with programmes which were local and RTE was shaken by the competition.

Today broadcasters in the region, like Highland and Ocean, owe a debt to pirate radio stations, like NWCR in Buncrana, KTOK in Donegal Town and DCR in Letterkenny, which paved the way for local alternatives to RTE.

That era of broadcasting in the 1980s is almost forgotten and so it became important to document it, especially as some people involved with radio at that time have sadly passed away.

So with the encouragement of a friend who works for a local station, I was persuaded to produce a radio documentary, to analyse how pirate broadcasters had a lasting social and cultural impact on communities in the North West, on both sides of the border.

Highland Radio dominates the airwaves of Donegal today, but it is amazing to recall that in the 1980s listeners in the region had a choice of at least six local stations.

I managed North West Community Radio (NWCR) in Buncrana, where I also presented a programme and I set up my own station, KTOK, in Donegal Town in 1987, where I was also a disc jockey.

I also worked as a programme presenter on ABC Radio in Waterford and Radio West in Mullingar. In the 1980s pioneers of local radio created a media industry that thrives today.

Technically it was illegal to broadcast without permission, but successive governments had failed to introduce a framework for licences, so entrepreneurs could start a radio station easily.

The impact of these pirate radio stations was huge. In the documentary, Daniel O’Donnell honestly admits he owes his success to unlicensed broadcasters.

“Pirate radio was very important for me because I kind of started the same time the pirate radios were coming on stream. The pirate radio stations at the time were playing what the people wanted to hear,” he says.

In Dublin stations like Sunshine and Radio Nova, played top 40 records all day, gaining bigger audiences than RTE. In regional Ireland, for example in Donegal, stations also played country music, the kind of tunes sung by Daniel O’Donnell.

“I had recorded ‘My Donegal Shore’ and ‘Stand Beside Me’ in 1983. Then I made an album with Ritz Records in 1985 and that was really when the pirate radios were at their height. Once you were played on the radio everybody heard it.”

Michael Bradley achieved fame as a guitarist with the Undertones, a punk music band from Derry, which recorded several hit records. He reveals how he became a pirate disc jockey on a station in Donegal.

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“It was a cottage in the middle of nowhere, kind of basic, but it had electricity. There was a tower outside, there was a transmitter outside. I really enjoyed it,” he says.

In the 1980s Ireland’s unlicensed broadcasters were following in the footsteps of pirate radio stations in the UK in the 1960s, transmitting from ships anchored in international waters. The famous disc jockey Tony Blackburn, entertained millions on Radio Caroline and Radio London. In the documentary, he admits to having an ulterior motive for getting on air.

“I heard about Radio Caroline and I wanted to become a singer and I thought by becoming a deejay I might get close to the record business,” he says.

Tony Blackburn has fond memories of Caroline.

“I remember going out on the first day on the tender boat and seeing this little ship in the North Sea and thinking it’s giving politicians so many problems and I thought I’m going to be a part of this, fabulous.”

He also reveals that unlicensed broadcasters in Ireland prompted an upsurge of illegal stations in the UK in the 1980s.

“I was very aware that there was a lot of pirate radio in Ireland and I thought it was great. Eventually in London and the Home Counties, they started doing the same over here as well,” he says.

The documentary features entrepreneurs talking exclusively for the first time about their investment in pirate radio. Jackie Crossan, one of the founders of NWCR in Buncrana in 1985, recalls that the audience across the border made the station popular.

“Our reception in Northern Ireland was fantastic we shot right across to Limavady and all that area. Then of course Derry with the population it had, the phone never stopped,” he remembers.

Paddy Simpson sold Donegal Community Radio in Letterkenny and set up a new station in Carndonagh.

“Our target wasn’t really Inishowen, our target was Northern Ireland. They were pirate radio stations, but at the time the Government had no will to close them down,” he says.

Newspapers across the northwest were worried that local radio stations would take their advertising revenue, but in the end they adapted. Pirate radio also had an unforeseen social impact in the years before the Good Friday Agreement, by uniting communities on both sides of the border.

Gregory Campbell MP says “it was seen as a bit of neutral space,” and it was “almost like a localised version of Radio Caroline.”

Mark Durkan, a former leader of the SDLP, agrees that radio signals do not stop at borders.

“This idea of radio in your own accent appealed to people. It allowed people to be very happy that things could happen in a cross-border sense.”

The first episode of the three-part documentary charting the history of pirate radio in the North West will be broadcast by Highland Radio on Wednesday, February 26, at 8.05pm.

The second and third episodes will be broadcast on Wednesday, March 5, and Wednesday March 12, at 8.05pm. The series is also available online at Highland Radio’s website.