Discover the true story of the almost 2500 pirate radio and television station that have broadcast in Ireland. The sometimes violent and colourful story of the stations and their eccentric owners. The story begins during the Easter Rising 1916 and the world's first pirate radio station up to today's legal and illegal stations. A fascinating decade by decade story.
History is one of my side hobbies and I enjoy reading about past events and such, especially if it involves the radio industry and electronics industry. It's fascinating to see how quickly things developed in a short span of 100 years versus the snail pace of advancement prior to the mid 1800's.
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If any of you are interested in Irish Pirate radio you may (or may not) find this short piece I wrote about the 1916 broadcasts interesting. There is also a connection to the Off Shore pirate era.
1916 Rising Radio the Worlds first radio broadcast? On Easter Tuesday the 25th of April 1916, one day after the declaration of an Irish Republic strange radio signals began to emanate from Dublin. Amid the fighting for the city something different in the world of radio was taking place. The Rising by a handful of determined rebels led by cabal of poets and Gaelic scholars was well under way, and fighting was breaking out around several Rebel held strong points. On the day before Easter Monday an order was sent forth from the GPO (General Post Office) headquarters of the rebellion. That order was to lead to an innovation, and a worlds’ first in the history of radio, maybe even several worlds’ firsts.
One of the leaders of the Irish forces Commandant-General Joseph Mary Plunkett gave the order for the occupation of the Dublin Wireless School of Telegraphy which was located on the corner of Lower Abbey Street and Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street). This building now houses a trendy bar. The school had been closed down, and sealed up by the British at the start of the First World War in case the equipment was used to communicate with German ships or U-Boats. The authorities had however failed to remove the transmitting equipment located in the school even though it had been largely dismantled.
Plunkett gave instructions for a Wireless Station to be set up with the equipment in the School. He had carefully chosen the men in the unit sent to occupy the Wireless School as among them were Fergus O’Kelly who had been in the British army as a member of the Army Signalling Corps, Joseph O’Connor who was an Electrician and had knowledge of Wireless Equipment, David Bourke who had experience as a Marconi operator and one Arthur Shields an actor who was later to appear in a number of Hollywood movies.
Their instructions were to transmit messages to ships in the Atlantic in the hope that they would in turn, relay them onwards to the United States to illicit help from Irish sympathisers there, and possibly the U.S. Government. The plan was to transmit a message to any receiving stations within range. Hopefully several ships would receive and relay the messages. This was a new idea, as up to that point transmissions were sent to be received by a particular receiving station in point to point communications. This new type of wide transmission was a broadcast which of course we all familiar with today.
After the taking of the building, the first task of the rebel unit was to rebuild the dismantled transmitters. They selected a 1.5 KW transmitter that had been a former ships transmitter. This has led to the mistaken belief in some quarters that the transmission was ship based. This is a story sometimes repeated on forums and blogs about ‘Off Shore’ broadcasting. The Transmitter in Irish Rebel hands never left the general vicinity of O’Connell Street.
This transmitter was rebuilt and set to transmit on the 300mtr band MW. The next task was to erect an aerial on the roof of the building. This task had to be completed under a hail of bullets from British snipers and possibly friendly fire from some of the more excitable rebels located on the roof of the GPO as well. The first attempted to place the aerial ended in the shooting dead of the Volunteer placing it. Another attempt was made this time with success. The transmissions could now begin. The first transmission took place sometime in the early evening of the 25th of April, and the broadcast lasted for nearly twenty four hours.
It is claimed that there were three messages broadcast in total. The text of only two is known to survive.
The first sent was “Irish Republic declared in Dublin today. Irish troops have captured city and are in full possession. Enemy cannot move in city. The whole country rising.” Should “Today” read as “Yesterday”?
A second message was intercepted by HMS Adventurer a British ship, then anchored in Kingstown Harbour (now Dun Laoghaire). This message stated; “British troops have been repulsed with great slaughter in the attempt to take the Irish positions. The people are wildly enthusiastic for the new Government.”
It is believed that extracts from the Proclamation of Independence which had been read out at the start of the Rebellion were also broadcast.
It seems that the only confirmed receptions of the broadcasts were from the east of Dublin in Kingstown and Wales. It may be that the aerial was wrongly aligned and was sending a stronger signal in the wrong direction. The Rebels themselves were unable to get any receiving equipment working so we shall never know if any reply was ever sent.
It has been claimed that at least one American ship did receive the transmissions and did indeed pass them along. Evidence for this may be that the U.S. newspapers of the day carried a fuller account of the Rising much earlier than the British press.
This may also be down to a number of other factors. 1. That as Britain was at war, a DORA (Defence of the Realm) notice is widely believed to have imposed on the existing media for the first few days of the Rising meaning a news ‘blackout’. 2. It is also likely that Irish Republican sympathisers in the States with some fore-knowledge of the planning for the Rising would have been passing stories to the papers to bolster the efforts in Ireland. 3. Newspapers of the day were not exactly known for their studious attention to detail or concise investigation methods (some things change, some things stay the same). Consider the journalist from the ‘Daily Mail’ who reported the later ‘War of Independence’ from second hand accounts gleaned from travellers through the port of Holyhead. In Holyhead he was safely insulated from the daily battles that formed the birth pangs of the Republic. He will be forever immortalised in song as ‘The Man from the Daily Mail’ for his efforts.
The British forces had by this stage recovered from their initial shock as a result of the Rising. Although they were not in the position to crush by force of numbers the Irish forces at this early stage. The British did bring several artillery pieces to bare this included weapons on the gunboat ‘Helga’ which sailed up the River Liffey to shell Rebel positions. The radio station came under sustained bombardment, although no one on the British side could have known or guessed exactly what was taking place inside. It was however considered to be a Rebel stronghold.
By the late evening of the 26th the position in the Wireless school had become desperate. The building was now ablaze, as were most of buildings surrounding it. The transmitter was shut down and dismantled for transport to another location. The Rebel unit were forced to withdraw to the relative safety of Headquarters in the GPO. They decided to try to continue broadcasting from that location.
Under withering fire pocking the ground all around them, several of the erstwhile broadcasters carried a number of pieces of the transmission equipment with them in an upturned table. They reached the GPO headquarters only to find it was impossible to return for the rest of the equipment. The Wireless School was now totally engulfed in flames. The world’s first broadcasting station was closed down. The transmitter parts were themselves engulfed in the flames that consumed the GPO later in the week never to be seen again. It’s safe to say that no Pirate Radio station since was ever put off the air in a more dramatic fashion. As the GPO was turned to a burnt-out shell, one of the Rebel leaders tried to lead a breakout of the tightening British cordon, he was shot down on the corner of Moore Street and died in a door way in Moore Lane. That Rebel was Michael O'Rahilly also known as ‘The O’Rahilly’. Almost 50 years later during Easter 1964 his Grandson Ronan O’Rahilly’s Pirate radio station ‘Radio Caroline’ started broadcasting in the North Sea. The timing of the Caroline launch was perhaps an extra anti-authoritarian gesture on Ronan’s part.
An interesting note to the use of radio during the events surrounding the Rising is that the ‘Aud’ the German ship that was transporting 20,000 captured Russian rifles, 10 machine guns, explosives and up to three million rounds of ammunition, for the supply of the Irish forces did not carry any wireless equipment. This led to a situation whereby the ship was unable to communicate with the Irish leaders in Dublin to inform them that the arms were now in Irish waters. The Captain tried in vain to contact to Rebels by other means, but without success.
After sailing around the Kerry coast the ship was trapped by a British Navy blockade. While it was being escorted into port Captain Spindler scuttled his ship. The much needed arms were sent to the bottom of the sea. The loss of these arms was a serious blow to the planners of the Rising. This led Chief-of-Staff of the Irish Volunteers Eoin MacNeill to issue an order cancelling the Rising planned for Easter Sunday. The other leaders went ahead on Easter Monday regardless.
MacNeill’s order however did greatly reduce the number of Volunteers that reported for duty, and caused widespread confusion among Volunteer units across Ireland. Had the arms been landed from the Aud, the Rising may have been a nation-wide Rebellion and may have taken a different turn. All for the want of a Transmitter - For want of a message the battle was lost.*
In the following War of Independence which lasted until the ceasefire of 1921, there seems to be very little evidence of any use of Wireless equipment as a means of communications between Irish units. Although the James Cagney film ‘Shake hands with the Devil’ shows the Irish forces making extensive use of radio equipment to pass and receive messages á la the French Resistance of the Second World War.
The reason for the lack of use of such a means of communication, may simply have been that the transmission equipment of the time was huge and needed a large power source (not common in the Ireland of the early twenty’s). It also needed trained operators, the Irish forces would have been hard enough pressed training men to use arms, never mind training them to be competent radio operators. That coupled with the regular raids by the Auxiliaries and the Black & Tan’s on any premises suspected of being a hub for the Irish Republican Army, would have meant any transmitting equipment would have soon been lost and the operators imprisoned. Receiving equipment was also very rare in civilian hands and this meant that radio was of very little use as a means of passing orders or indeed informing the public of the struggle.
Historians and commentators have disagreed on this almost forgotten set of transmissions. Were they as some have suggested the ‘Worlds first broadcast’ or perhaps the ‘Worlds first Pirate radio broadcast, the ‘Worlds first News broadcast’ or even the ‘Worlds first Clandestine radio station? Maybe all are true. I can only be sure that when the Rebels decided to broadcast their messages to the world they had embraced the very cutting edge of technology at the time and turned it in a radical new direction.
On April 25th 2012, ninety six years after these transmissions were made; I uploaded a clip to YouTube. This clip is a recreation of the Morse code messages sent during the Rising. As far as I am aware this is the first time these messages have been recreated and rebroadcast (all be it through the medium of the Internet) since 1916.
In three short years it will be the 100th Anniversary of the Easter Rising. I would like to suggest to any amateur radio operators reading this that a fitting tribute to the broadcasts of 1916 would be a radio rally set up in Dublin for Easter 2016 as part of the Rising commemorations to rebroadcast the messages transmitted by the Volunteer unit in the Irish School of Wireless and Telegraphy. The present owners of the building could I’m sure could easily be persuaded to host a Transmission station during the 2016 celebrations.
*From "For Want of a Nail” For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the message was lost. For want of a message the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
The links to the videos the first video is just the Morse code as it would have sounded. The second has musical background to take the 'dryness' off it.
"Lets see' we're on err 92 FM tonight, and it feels like a nice clean little band so far. No one else is using it. The price is right."
Mark Hunter - Pump Up The Volume.
