Madam, - On Thursday, April 1st, a rather special birthday is probably going to go uncelebrated, which would be a great shame: exactly 40 years ago, on April Fool's Day, a converted merchant ship, the Mi Amigo, anchored in international waters off England's Essex coast, began to broadcast. The government was apoplectic, listeners throughout the British Isles cheered, and ten weeks later a national opinion poll revealed that Radio Caroline - named after the late President Kennedy's daughter - already had more listeners than all the BBC's radio stations combined. Dear old "Auntie Beeb" had to undergo immediate surgery - out with all the superficial pop, and in with the new, hip sounds of the sixties. Caroline had changed the face of European popular music broadcasting forever.
Who was behind this phenomenon? Ronan O'Rahilly, a young maverick and visionary, and grandson of Michael Joseph O'Rahilly, The O'Rahilly, hero of the 1916 Rising, who died leading a charge against an English barricade in Dublin. It says much about Ronan that his response to the loss of his revered grandfather should have been the invasion of England, almost half a century later, with music, rather than with hatred and artillery.
So began a running battle between England's Labour government and Caroline which lasted for more than 20 years. On one notable occasion, O'Rahilly was invited to the House of Commons by the Conservative shadow home secretary, Reginald Maudling.
The prime minister, Harold Wilson, caught sight of the "pirate", stuck a finger in his chest and said, "You're finished!" A few months later, Mr Wilson was out of office - and Caroline continued to broadcast.
O'Rahilly must look back with deep satisfaction on an adventure which created so many careers, made so many people millionaires - although he himself, ironically, is not one of them.
He was never "in it for the money", but because he has had a lifelong respect for the music that rose from the ghettoes and outlands on both sides of the Atlantic and eventually, with Caroline's help, became mainstream.
Countless people in Britain of a certain age still remember the Caroline years with great affection. To quote Michael O'Rahilly himself, describing the 1916 Rising in his final letter to Countess Markievicz, a day or two before he died in a hail of English bullets: "It is madness, but it is glorious madness." - Yours, etc.,
MICHAEL JOSEPH, Balcombe Street, London