I don't want McDonalds - I'll have 2FM instead...

2FM is Irelands National Youth Broadcaster. Having said that, perhaps I am over-specifying its purpose. It's not really like Britain's apparant equivalent Radio One, in the sense that it has a wider demographic musically, and seems to serve more as a community service than Radio One ever did. I guess its not fair to compare them, but people seem to do that because they are both national popular music services.

When I were a lad, it was called Radio Two. Run by RTE (Radio Telefis Eireann, Irelands National Broadcaster) Radio Two was created to combat the pirate radio stations, of which there were literally hundreds scattered throughout Ireland from the early seventies to the late eighties.

I remember when Radio Two first hit the airwaves in April 1979. It was a friday and I was at art class in the school where I lived, in Limerick, on the west coast. I was regularly sneaking out the dorm window at night to secretly spin 45's on a local pirate station called LBC (Limerick Broadcasting Company), so I was pretty tired that friday, following a Thursday night of illegal broadcasting activity! Gee, the things we got away with in that boarding school!

Someone called Larry Gogan did the first show of the opening of Radio Two (that is, after all the boring politicians drivelled on about stuff no 15 year old would understand or care about). So there was Larry, spinning his first tune on a station clearly set up to offset the robbed ratings from all those pirate stations operating from people's sheds, attics, and whereever else. If I recall correctly it was The Boomtown Rats, but I can't be sure. Larry Gogan still holds that afternoon slot on 2FM today, but boy, how that station has grown around him over the quarter of a century that has since passed.

"Comin' at ya" was the call sign from RTE's new "pop" radio service back in '79. And come at us they did. With records that could not be played in full because RTE were not prepared to pay the full royalties. Come at us they did, with "stunted" DJ's whose lyrical nature was controlled and muffled by a stoic old-school team of autocrats who were still reeling from the shock that someone decided to actually go ahead with this "pop" station. RTE started this new station in an effort to stave off the hunger for pirate radio, and later found themselves up against the ultimate weapon, the ultra-polished "Super" pirate station Radio Nova, who swept the whole country with a slick American style radio no one in the whole of Europe had heard before, never mind Ireland! But RTE were bad. Real bad. And now they were in trouble. They had just spent all that public money, and a pirate station (Nova) was cleaning up. No abate. The whole situation got so bad, RTE started illegally jamming Nova's signal, but hey, that's another story!

So needless to say, as a young chap doing news on Nova, I absolutely hated Radio Two. Then a couple of years later, to my utter horror, they stole Nova's top presenter John Clarke! I soon realised that RTE's way of beating Nova was to take their presenters. And over the following years, they took a hell of a lot of them!

The years passed, and I left Ireland to live in the UK, Israel and France, eventually ending up in Australia. That period of time was mostly pre-internet, so I had no idea what was going on radio-wise in Ireland. After all I could not hear radio there. In the late 90's I was suddenly able to hear Irish radio again through the net. Well now, that was an eye-opener. Living in Sydney, I am well used to "formatted" radio, and how atrocious it can (and usually) is. Local radio in Dublin can be quite atrocious too.

Okay. okay, I can hear you screaming "RADIO NOVA WAS A FORMATTED STATION". Okay! You're right! It was! But it's selection of music was carefully planned (mostly by John Clarke), and the DJ's WERE allowed to have personalities! John Clarke - what a personality! - Gareth O'Callaghan, Liam Quigley, and the list goes on. I've known these people, and I can still hear them today - not on local radio stations in Dublin, but on that old rusty "Radio Two" that was upgraded to 2FM somewhere between when I left Ireland and the new millennium. 2FM is clearly "personality driven". The two biggest commercial stations in Dublin are clearly format-driven and it drives me nuts. No offence to my mates who work on those stations, but these stations are sooooooo boring!

Obviously there are exceptions, Phantom FM being one of them. Newstalk 106 being another. Even Dublin's Country. Look the point I'm making here is not to trash the commercial stations in Dublin. That has been done enough already. I'm just very impressed with 2FM, and I find two great ironies here. The first one is that the national pop station ends up being the one that I admire, and the second is that the commercial stations were partly created because the national pop station didn't have it's shit together, and now it is kicking their asses because they have fallen into the broadcasting abyss I call "globally organised diahorrea". It's like fast food. It tastes the same all over the world. Problem is, I don't eat fast food.

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