My background is in rural and community development. I was involved with an organisation called Connemara West, and we became aware that in north Connemara, with a dispersed rural population, there was a lack of information and of a forum for debate. We set up a pirate radio station, but only for two months, because the new legislation came in and we went off air.
In fact, we were off the air for seven years. The invitation to apply to the IRTC for a licence did not come until 1995.
I work full-time as the station co-ordinator. We have one person employed as a part-time technician and three people under community-employment schemes. As staff, all of us run the station from day to day and support the core of 70 volunteers who each week do something with the radio.
Those volunteers are involved mainly in the programming area, whether that's as receptionists, presenters, producers or technicians.
Training of volunteers is a big part of our work, either informally - with people apprenticed to a particular evening - or through workshops and evening classes.
We're also involved with UCG and the IRTC under a New Opportunities for Women programme, which has given us an opportunity to do more intensive training with some of our women volunteers.
We broadcast each evening between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. because that's the time the volunteers can commit themselves. But that isn't peak radio-listening time - so we repeat that chunk of programming the next day between noon and 3 p.m.; we also do an hour's live programming each day from 11 a.m. to 12 noon. That gives us a seven-hour block of programming each day, of which three hours is a repeat from the previous evening. I start work at around 9.30 a.m. The first thing is to deal with the messages from the previous evening's team. We check the morning's newspapers for the 11to-12 programme. Because people are working part-time there's quite a lot of co-ordination.
The post leaves us here at 3 p.m., so correspondence has to be out by then. There would also be contact between the office and whoever is in the team for that evening - for example if they want to come in and pre-record an interview and ensure that a technician and the studio are available.
We're the smallest radio station operating in Ireland in terms of population, but geographically we're one of the biggest. We have around 9,000 people but we cover 800 square kilometres. All our programmes would have some significance locally - we don't target certain age brackets for commercial purposes.
We've programmes, for example, on farming, wildlife, environmental issues, traditional music and interviews about community matters. At least 50 per cent of our output is talk - that is a requirement of our contract with the IRTC.
Fund-raising is another big difference between community stations and the commercial sector. The revenue from advertising cannot be more than 50 per cent of our total income. The other half has to come from fund-raising events like pub quizzes. And unless the product or service being advertised is either delivered or produced in the area, the community station is prohibited from taking the ad.
There's also a quota that there should be no fewer than 40 per cent of either gender on the board of management.
When we went off the air at the end of 1988, one woman wrote in saying that listening to station meant that for the first time in her life she felt where she lived was the centre of the world. I think if community radio can do that, particularly in a place like Connemara, it is a major achievement.
In an interview with Trish O'Donovan
