Thirty years ago this month, I became a company director for the first and only time in my life. I was 19.
With little fanfare, College Campus Radio Ltd was registered to enable the establishment of what would become known as Flirt FM, Galway’s student radio station.
‘User generated content’ is now so commonplace that it can be difficult to remember – or to persuade my students – what a radical step a participatory radio station was. Even among those involved in temporary Rag Week stations, the presumption was that only an elite few (mainly semi-professional DJs ) should be trusted with access to the airwaves.
Our vision - which had secured us a license ahead of UCD and Trinity - was different. Yes, there are technical skills involved in broadcasting, but the basics can be mastered by anyone wishing to go on air. During our first year, my estimate was that 250 people passed through our studio doors.
I’ve been thinking back to those early days recently, partly in light of an upcoming 30-year reunion later this year. In part, also, as today (February 13 ) has been recognised for over a decade now as World Radio Day. This year’s theme (Radio and Climate Change ) draws attention to the role radio can play in providing reliable information, and helping shape public attitudes towards this crucial issue.
Galway has a surprisingly prominent place – for better and for worse – in the history of radio.
Marconi’s establishment of his wireless telegraphy station outside Clifden in 1907 marked the establishment of permanent transatlantic radio links, revolutionising communications. Before radio, when a ship headed over the horizon it was out of contact until it returned. With radio telegraphy, notorious murderer Dr Crippen’s attempted transatlantic escape was foiled on 1910. Before radio, the Titantic would have sunk without other ships learning of its fate. With radio, other ships diverted course to rescue survivors.
I don’t mean to give the impression that radio (or even radio in Galway ) is unequivocally a force for good in the world – one of the most infamous Nazi propagandists was Galway’s William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, who had, as Mary Kenny noted in her biography, Germany Calling: “the negative distinction of being the last man ever to be hanged for high treason by the British Crown,” on account of his wartime broadcasts.
But if radio has been harnessed for ill, it has just as much - if not more - potential as an inclusive and participatory medium. Walter Benjamin, who earned much of his living up to 1933 writing for radio, put it eloquently:
“Every child recognises that it is in the interest of radio to bring anyone before the microphone at any opportunity, making the public witness to interviews and conversations in which anyone might have a say.”
It is that intimacy that makes radio special – that sense of eavesdropping, or of being addressed intimately by the speaker. Marshall McLuhan, declaring radio to be a ‘hot’ medium, talks of the ‘immediate experience’ of radio, the ‘unspoken communication’ between speaker and listener.
Of course, just as the transistor radio allowed for a more intimate, personal, experience of radio (replacing the large vacuum-tube sets of the 1930s and ‘40s ), so too have new technologies upended how we consume radio. Podcasting and streaming have decoupled radio from radio-waves, and given audio programming a new life.
And yet, there is still something special for me when I sit before a microphone, whether live on air (these days back in my old stomping grounds of Flirt FM ) or recording in a sound editor. That little intake of breath, the pause (but not too long! ) as I marvel once more at this intimate, powerful, medium.
Dr Andrew Ó Baoill is lecturer at the School of English, Media and Creative Arts at University of Galway.
