RadioReview: The first demonstration I attended was in support of the right of young people to hear the music they wanted to listen to. A few hundred callow youth, myself included, slouched up O'Connell Street behind a trailer blaring tinny pop music and cheered as a strange little man called on the Government to give his pirate radio station a licence.
But Eamonn Cooke, the founder of Radio Dublin (who would later be jailed for sexual abusing young girls), was to be swept aside quickly when Ray Burke came along later to dish out the commercial radio "licences to print money".
Twirling the radio dial today, almost a quarter of a century later, it's worth asking whether the greater choice of music we marched for has been provided. The FM band is fuller than ever, it is true, though the stranglehold of the playlist is palpable and you would be hard pressed to tell one anodyne music station from another but for their incessant jingles.
There are many good specialist music programmes; this week alone, for example, there was Frank McGuinness's engaging (though seven-year-old) essay on the music of Elvis Costello in A Giant at my Shoulder (RTÉ Radio 1, Saturday) and Joe Jackson's intelligent fan's guide to the Gospel according to Elvis (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday). Great DJs such as Donal Dineen (Today FM) and Lilian Smith (RTÉ Radio 1) create mesmeric soundscapes with the music they love, though both are banished inexplicably to the early hours of the morning.
Yet the anarchic, unpredictable atmosphere of the pirate era is long gone. The sense of music radio as an adventure and an educative force is rare. Modern-day pirates are ruthlessly pursued because of the threat they might pose to the licensed stations. Phantom FM, the one pirate to get a licence, has had its start-up delayed for two years by litigation; the indie music station finally begins broadcasting in the autumn.
It's enough to send young people on to the streets - or maybe not, given the times. In any case, young people's obsessions may have moved on, with one blogger claiming that bebo.com is "the new pirate radio" the authorities want to ban.
"IRON MAN" MICK Murphy's win in the 1958 Rás Tailteann, one of Irish sport's most astonishing stories, was recounted in A Convict of the Road (RTÉ Radio 1, Sunday). In a week when the winner of the Tour de France and the world's fastest sprinter both failed drug tests, here was a tale from another era, altogether poverty-stricken but hardly any less competitive.
Murphy, in the words of narrator Peter Woods, was "an acrobat, fireater, strongman, street-performer, bricklayer, spailpín and, most of all, cyclist". As a child, he performed circus tricks on the streets of Cork to earn a crust, balancing ladders on his chin. In the summers, he worked as a migrant labourer in Munster farms, all the while training obsessively on his bicycle. Before the 1958 race, he lived in a lair in the woods in north Cork, training with stone weights and engaging in his own, primitive form of blood doping. "I'd tap the cow's veins and squeeze the blood into the water-bottle," Murphy told us in a voice scraped from the gravel on the roads he travelled.
In the Rás, he took the "yellow mantle" early on and fought like a lion to hold on to it. When his own bike broke, he stole a farmer's bike and chased down the pack. After a crash, he spent days strapped to his bike, with the agony relieved only by the "shrieking shawlies" of Cork who recognised him from the streets.
His glory days were short-lived. By 1960, he had retired from cycling at the age of 27 and taken the boat to England to work on the sites. Now 73, Murphy lives in Kerry in a cottage with no running water, and the windows are covered with galvanize. The only furniture is a table and two chairs, and the radio. After 13 crashes, it's hardly surprising that he walks on sticks. He doesn't get out much.
Woods brought the hero of 1958 back to a stage of this year's Rás in north Kerry. People lined up to shake his hand and take his picture. Old rivals emerged to pay their respects.
Murphy, out for the first time in 46 years at an event which passes yearly near his home, seemed reluctant to leave. His parting words: "Defend the yellow mantle!"
Bernice Harrison is on leave
