Two Walls and a Roof

by John Michael Cahill

  It is only fair to say that the pirate radio years would rob me and Etta of a normal family life. I was never at home, and when I was home, I was only half there. Usually my head would be glued to the radio in case it went off or sounded bad. All this stress was happening at the expense of my three children. By then my eldest son Adrian was about eight and Lynda, my daughter, would be about five years old. Kyrl, my youngest son, was still a baby, and so I think he escaped from having no dad, but the other two were truly reared by their mother, and all credit is due to her for how well they turned out. At the time of writing, Adrian has just immigrated to Australia, and Lynda is in the process of completing a Civil Engineering Degree, having already obtained a Marketing Degree in Dublin. Adrian has a PhD in Computer Science and my Kyrl is head of IT for Cork’s 96fm and C103, as well as engineer for Limerick’s Live 95 radio station. I am exceptionally proud of all three of them, and it never ceases to amaze me just how funny they all are and how different in personality each of them is. Even though I was missing for most of their rearing, when I was there it was usually a time of drama and fun. They often remind me of one occasion when we got the mad idea that we should buy a big tent and get into the camping spirit of things as a way of having family time, and it almost ended in an early divorce. We bought this huge and very expensive tent in Cork. It had no assembly instructions with it, or they got lost before we got to read them, and that would be typical of us anyway. Etta wanted to go off on a trip almost immediately, but not me. I felt we needed to assemble the tent as a test, and where better than out in our own backyard. I just wanted to get the feel for it before we got marooned in Kerry. This was an almost prophetic statement as it transpired. We set about this assembling on a warm Sunday afternoon, and after three hours we had constructed this God awful monstrosity. It leaned sideways and tilted down in the front, much like a Bedouin tent. We had started off assembling happily enough, but after an hour of confusion, the shouting began and all I wanted to do in the end was get it up somehow. I left it up for the next few days, being in no mood to even attempt taking it down. Then of course it rained, ruining the inside and outside, as it all fell over from a wind in the night. I was neither impressed nor surprised at any of this, not being a camping type at heart. Etta tried to dry it out over the next week or so, and even though we had made a total mess of our first attempt at assembly, she was determined that we should go to Kerry the following weekend. Myself and Adrian believed that we could make our own diagram based on laying out every single pole, bar, and peg in the backyard before we would commit to the trip, and this we did. It had all kinds of poles and bars and spikes, as well as a huge number of pegs and strings. It was a sheer nightmare just looking at all this stuff on the ground, but it was Saturday and Etta was hassling us to get a move on with the figuring. We tried for hours to make some kind of sense of it all, and finally we thought we had it solved and drew it all out on a bit of paper. Then almost on a whim, we set off for Tralee in the late evening sunshine. When we got to the Banna Strand campsite it was pitch black. We set about setting up the harem by the light from the car. This didn’t go well for us, not well at all. Firstly we were all hungry and tired, and to make matters worse, I had forgotten the bloody drawing, so we were working off memory or guesswork again. Because of the rush leaving, we had decided on a barbecue for our food after the tent was up. This barbecue was to be our dinner, tea and supper, and Etta was to do the cooking while we assembled the Bedouin tent. She had never done any barbecuing before and no matter what she tried, she could not get the charcoal to light. I had no idea either, but Adrian, Lynda and I were already fighting and shouting as to how to assemble the tent. By then it was really getting late, and we were all cold, hungry and still had no place to sleep. Unknown to us, we were the cause of much merriment from the other experienced campers on the site. We temporarily gave up on the tent and I took over the fire work, beginning by making balls of newspaper and setting them on fire, then roaring at Etta to blow the flames like mad under the coals. This was no good, as she smoked too much and had no breath at all. I was arguing with her about smoking and blaming the fags for all our ills as the kids tried to get the tent set up without me. I had a fallback plan for making tea. This was a small little gas ring that worked on a portable container of gas, and I had bought two of these containers, so we were set. I called a halt to all work, saying that we needed tea to think, and got out my gas ring. I had no idea how to connect this ring to its gas container, and on my first attempt it exploded, spewing liquid gas in every direction. It was a miracle the fire had gone out, or there could have been a real tragedy. I got such a shock that I threw it into a sand dune until it stopped hissing. In my ignorance I thought it was a faulty tank, so I repeated the exercise with the second tank, cautiously screwing down the ring. Once again it too exploded. Now I was really mad and threw the whole lot into the dunes again and left it there. No tea for any of us now by the look of things.

  Tempers flew, and within minutes we were all screaming at each other, all well into the blame game. Camping was fast loosing its appeal for me. Eventually we calmed down and I said to Etta that I’d get the bloody fire going even if it killed me, and it nearly did. I decided that science and my knowledge of physics were the only answer, so I resorted to the one thing I could rely on to burn; I would use petrol.

  I got under the car and siphoned off a bottle of it from the tank, swallowing almost as much in the process. Then in triumph I poured it all over the coals. These were still hot, and fumes seemed to be forming. I threw a bit of lighting paper at it, remembering the mother’s ‘lighter’ and her gas incident, and suddenly there was yet another explosion. This time the whole area lit up. I remember nearby campers going, “Wow look at that fire”, and heads popping out of tents on all sides. Even though the coals seemed to catch fire, they soon went out again, and even more petrol went in with the same result. By then we had an audience. One guy advised us to pull back the car, and others pulled their children to safety while my gang had yet another go at the tent.

  I was now happy because at least we had heat, and to spur it on I added yet another dash of the petrol. This time the flash was way too close for comfort and I jumped back, spilling the petrol down the leg of the barbecue, which then caught fire, as did the ground underneath it. At that point the onlookers really became nervous. People pulled their cars way back and the fire brigade was even mentioned. After half an hour of this flame throwing, a nice English woman came across from the nearest tent and said that we were the maddest people she had ever seen in her life, that she and her husband hadn’t laughed so much in years, so they offered to help us. She gave me the proper firelighters and we were off at last.

  I became the chef and put on the sausages, burgers and rashers. They were not cooking fast enough for me, so when the rest weren’t looking, I added the last of the petrol ‘just to speed things up’. More flames followed, and I was spotted. The food was cremated, having turned completely black and looking like charcoal. Not to be defeated though, I got out the plates and dished out the cremated food, assuring my lot that this was what barbecuing was all about: roughing it with burnt food in the open air. Sure what could be better! Even though starved, the kids flatly refused to eat anything. Etta followed. I was facing a revolt on all fronts. They were all prepared to go hungry rather than eat this black meat, and a strike had happened. I couldn’t let them get away with that, so I decided to lead by example and attacked all their plates, eating down this carbonized food by myself, all the time saying how wonderful it was. It was awful, but I couldn’t give in at that stage. I encouraged them to just try it out and see what it tasted like, saying, “There’s nothing like food in the open air when you’re starved with the hunger”. All of the rebels again refused, and I had to finish the food out of sheer spite. It was like a lump of lead in my belly. This lump seemed to get bigger and denser as the night wore on. Soon it was time to retire to the tilting harem, which looked even worse than it had
done out our back yard, but by then I was wrecked and prepared to sleep on a stone.

  About four a.m. the rumbling in my stomach began, and I had to get up really fast and make a dash for the toilet. It was locked of course. By then nature wasn’t just calling, she was roaring. I ran to the dunes in the dark and fell over something, and couldn’t wait any longer. There and then I did my business. In all of my panic I had forgotten the golden rule of camping which was to always have a toilet roll handy. I was then in a real fix. In the dark I reached around and tried to find a paper or some litter of any kind, but there was nothing, and I cursed the Kerry County Council for being too thorough with their cleaning. In the end I suffered the great ignominy of having to use grass to wipe my ass. That was the last straw for me; camping was out from then on, I was doing no more of it.

  Morning dawned with the rain and wind lashing the tent from all sides. We looked out like a group of caged animals which were completely starved, (a truth in itself) and in very bad humour once again. I was worse than any of them, having had no sleep at all during the night from my many trips to the dunes. After half an hour of staring at the rain, I said, “That’s it, we’re fucking off from this place and don’t mention camping ever again,” so Etta says, “And how do you propose we do that? I’m not getting drowned in this rain”. Another plan was needed, and Adrian had the perfect answer. We dispatched the others to the car, the two of us donned our swimming togs, and then we set about dismantling the harem and removing all the stuff. It lashed down on top of us but we didn’t give a damn. We dismantled it all in a kind of mad dance, singing and laughing our heads off. Once again we had provided entertainment for the others on the site, and as we left Banna Strand, we still had our togs on. After a mile or so we changed and had breakfast, dinner, tea and anything else in a restaurant in Tralee. The lesson we learned from that experience was that if we ever became vagrants, we would surely perish.

  My family not alone suffered from having no father, but they were all actually roped into helping me on numerous occasions. Always we strived for more and more radio coverage, which meant that I was always searching for more and more transmission sites. We had a site on the Galty Mountains which was accessible only by a three hour climb of over two thousand feet. It was the most difficult site we had and in hindsight it was a huge mistake to have put a transmitter there, but it covered hundreds of miles. I climbed this mountain with Etta twice on one day trying to fix a problem that was intermittent. It was heartbreaking having climbed it once, to arrive back down and realize that the problem was still there. Even though I was prepared to go back alone, she would not hear of it and back the two of us went for another three hour hike to the top. We had no food, no water and the only thing going for us was that we were both very fit then. On another occasion myself, Adrian, and a friend of his set off for that mountain to fix some problem. It started out sunny enough, and to reduce weight, all we took with us was my coat. On that journey we got soaked by sleet, a storm hit us, and finally it rained so hard that all three of us tried to hide under my coat as we squatted down and leaned against the wind on the open face of the Galty Mountain. Then when it passed we headed on up to the top. Adrian’s friend never went with us again, and after a major storm when the whole site was almost blown away, I had had enough and we pulled it. Radios or not, without a road we were not going back there again.

  No one would believe the things we did in the pirate radio days, or how much we suffered so that the listeners could hear us. I’m quite sure too that all the other engineers in Ireland who went through that phase have similar stories to tell, and the pity of it is that only their families know what we went through. While I am sure many of those engineers prospered, in my case I was not even being paid at that time. In the end the government, in their wisdom, would legalise radio in Ireland and grant licences to about twenty four of those radio stations.

  I would say it was about nineteen eighty eight or nine when the community radio known as North Cork Community Radio would begin preparing for a legal licence submission, while still broadcasting away illegally. A subcommittee was formed to write our license submission. A great friend of mine and Jack’s called DC Buckley would do the programming section, Donal Collins would handle the financial projections for us, and I would do the technical submission. In actual practice, DC and I actually wrote the whole document with Donal giving us the figures and acting as an unofficial editor. A book could be written about what happened next, but suffice to say that we were finally and almost reluctantly granted a licence to broadcast into North Cork by the IRTC. This Irish Radio and Television Commission were the government body set up earlier to oversee the advent of local radio in Ireland. Over the coming years I would develop many friendships with people in that body, but at the time they were seen as the most fearsome of civil servants, and nothing could have been further from the truth.

  By then Jack O’Rourke had become a major player in the success of the community radio and he was the contact person for the IRTC on the day that the licences were awarded. I clearly remember the morning that the call came through to Jack’s office. We became elated and I think I stuck a Christmas tree with lights on the roof of our studios, which by then were relocated to the Majestic Ballroom – Jack’s old dance hall. Whatever about the pirate madness, we were truly then in the big time madness. We had no money, no official transmission site, and not one single bit of the old equipment that we could use. Despite this, some of the Board members believed that all I had to do was throw a switch and we would be back on air. In addition we had no CEO, but we did have a deadline that had to be met, or the licence would be revoked. What we did have though was a dedicated team of people who, having obtained the license the hard way, would not allow its revocation under any circumstances. It was my job to project-manage the operation while DC, Jack and the rest of the Board agreed to somehow find the money needed, and they did.

  On January the 26th nineteen ninety NCCR, the original pirate radio station, began legally broadcasting under its new name of County Sound Radio, and yet another amazing chapter in my life would begin. Before leaving that period of illegal transmissions, it’s only right that I recall a short-lived but hilarious period of illegal television broadcasting that I was involved in.

  Local Television.

  The video recorder machine had just been invented by both JVC and Sony and they were battling it out for supremacy in that new field of consumer electronics. To be able to record a television show at one hour, and watch it at a later time just utterly fascinated me. I know that both Larry and I had tried to invent this system years earlier and had failed, so when the machine was finally in production, I was determined that I would become a real expert on it. I studied everything that I could find about this new device. When on our trips to London I bought every video book I could find, and I specifically learned the mechanism and electronic circuits thoroughly. In a short time I really did become an expert and could fix almost any fault in any of them.

  One day while driving along doing my television calls and thinking of these devices, I suddenly got a flash of inspiration. I knew without any doubt just how to turn a video recorder into a television station because I reasoned that there was a device inside the machine called a modulator, and it was in fact a very low power transmitter. All I had to do was to make its signal stronger, and it would travel a long distance just like a radio signal. Then if one plugged an actual video camera into the video recorder, you would immediately have live television. All of this came to me as I drove home to Buttevant for a visit with the mother and father, and I got so excited that I almost did not go home at all. I wanted to turn back to try it out, but I did go home and met up with my father. I told him all about my theory and all that he said was, “Jekus boys John, surely there’s no way that will ever work because if it did, God only knows where it might end”. The minute I got back to the workshop I proved that it would work, and I remember transmitting the science fiction classic 2
001: A Space Odyssey across the workshop. I felt like Marconi did when he sent a signal across the Atlantic, and I couldn’t wait to tell Larry. He was less enthusiastic than I had expected, believing that I was already wasting enough of his time on a pirate radio, so a pirate television station did not appeal to him at all. However he did not completely veto the idea of me working on it, but it had to be on a separate business entirely. In any case I soon told Jack O’Rourke all about the new idea and convinced him that the three of us should become partners and set up Mallow’s first ever local television station. He immediately agreed, and each of us invested a hundred pounds. I bought the amplifier that I needed and we began the project.

  After all the years I can still see myself setting up the aerial on the very high roof of our shop, and beaming out a colour-bar test-signal secretly across Mallow town. The picture looked great and each of us became very excited at what might happen next. We saw ourselves needing programmes, doing recordings of matches and local events, and having commercials made for the business community. I was on a high all the time and never considered the illegality side of things.

  Then Larry mentioned it to an amazing man called Alan Watson. Alan had a video production company and was a great success locally in that exciting field, but it was not live television. This is where a debate might begin, but in any case Alan stole a march on us and decided to do it all by himself. In fact I would probably have done the same thing myself, as he had every bit of equipment he needed except a transmitter. He did have one ace though; he knew a brilliant engineer by the name of Dessie Wallace who went off and secretly built him one in a few weeks.

  The end result was that Alan made it public that he was going to be making a local television broadcast on a Saturday night. When I heard all about it, I went ballistic. Larry and Jack gave up on the project immediately, but I was dead set on revenge and the minute Allan’s test card came on, I wiped it out with my transmitter. Dessie retuned his box, which took a few days, and the next week I wiped that one out as well. A tit for tat war then began, and Alan was in a pickle with egg on his face, so he called to see me in our shop. To say that we had an argument would be putting it mildly. I was shouting so much that even Larry told me to take the argument to the street, which we did. Oblivious to the many onlookers who knew us both, we shouted and cursed each other for a long time. I was screaming that he stole my idea and Allan was swearing that he got the idea at the same time and that it was pure coincidence. Then he said something to me which I cannot remember now, but it was so funny and crazy that it stopped me in mid curse, and I actually exploded with laughter. Then he started to laugh too, and within seconds we were both laughing so hard that we had to hold on to each other to keep standing. I’ll never forget it; one moment were ready to kill each other, and the next we were in a state of utter merriment. After we calmed down and passers-by realized it was almost normal behaviour for us, Alan said to me, “Johnny boy, I like you. Why don’t we join forces and stop this arguing?”