The Come Here To Me blog writes: "Ireland has a long history of pirate radio, something I’ve looked at before in an article for Rabble that can be read here. This brief article looks at a number of political pirate radio stations that operated in Dublin, many of which were operated by the republican movement as a means of spreading propaganda."
Read full article at: http://comeheretome.com/2014/02/13/some-notes-on-political-pirate-radio-stations-in-dublin/
Source: www.achimbrueckner.de/freeradio/php/wordpress/
Thanks for sharing. A really interesting piece. The article looks at mostly Republican pirate broadcasting stations including Radio Free Derry in the disputed North of Ireland. Historian Eammon McCann mentiones RFD in his account of the late sixties in Ireland. There were also pro-Unionist stations, one of which featured a female announcer who was dubbed "Orange Lily" after "Tokyo Rose" (the female announcer of Japanese propaganda broadcasts in World War II).
ReplyDeleteIf I recall correctly, Anoraks UK reported in the middle 1980's on a different type of political pirate - the Workers Party (formerly the Irish Communist Party) ran a station briefly in the Dublin area. This is ironic, as the official platform of the Irish Workers Party was to support regulation of radio and oppose the free market free for all of the "superpirate" era.
And in the 1990's there was Radio Active on 101 FM in Dublin, a station which was more activist rooted, and was similar in ethos to the continental free radio movement or the US micropower movement. It broadcast a variety of underground music and was libertarian-left in political outlook. Their tribute page is still up online I believe. I was in Dublin in about 1993 and remember seeing lots of stickers on lamposts advertising this station.