Centre Radio was originally located in the north Dublin suburb of Baldoyle and ran, on and off, from December 1986 through to December 1988. The station was launched by two of the original founders of Big Beat Radio, which had also been based in Baldoyle and had ran during the summer holidays earlier in 1986. Centre Radio was a natural progression of Big Beat Radio, and was named thanks to the £30 purchase of a cassette containing jingles.
Centre Radio’s first day of broadcast was December 19th 1986 and it ran for the duration of the school holidays. It was located in the Baldoyle Youth Club on the Grange Road in Baldoyle. At this point, Centre Radio was on 88FM broadcasting in mono with an ERP of 40W. The signal and sound were an improvement on what had been achieved with Big Beat Radio. The new jingle package proclaimed that the station was ‘at the centre of everything’.
They returned for both the Easter and Summer school holidays in 1987, and had relocated to a garden shed in Peter Walsh’s back garden, also in Baldoyle, and by the end of the year the station were helping train young people from the area in radio broadcasting. Over the course of the year they had also been on 96FM and 106 FM at different stages.
In February 1988, the station commenced broadcasting every weekday evening from 5-11pm and from 10am-11pm at weekends. At this stage, they had moved ‘down the road’ to Bayside Community Centre and had started to take local advertising, mainly from businesses based in the nearby shopping centre. Studio gear consisted of two cassette decks and two turntables. Frequencies confirmed as used during 1988 are 91.8MHz, 92.5MHz, 94.1MHz, 94.2MHz and 94.7MHz. TV interference meant they moved around a lot.
Tom Berry, who was old enough to be the father of those involved with the station, also became involved in 1988, and offered guidance on programme output and gathering support from the public.
It all came to an end on December 31st 1988 when Centre Radio closed in compliance with a new broadcast act that outlawed the pirates with tough new fines and threats of imprisonment. This was introduced to pave the way for a new era of licensed radio but stations like Centre Radio never really stood a chance of getting one of the new licences, at least until community type licences were introduced later in the process.
The station pulled out all the stops for a final, emotional two days of broadcasting on 94.2MHz, going right to the wire with a midnight closedown on the 31st, and also claiming to be the only independent station in Dublin still running a news service on the final day.
They submitted an ultimately unsuccessful expression of interest in a local licence for the northeast of Dublin.
Station history compiled with help from John Walsh, known on-air as Richard Taylor
Frequency Logs
- 1988 December (4th) – 94.1MHz (Smile FM bandscan)
- 1988 December (31st) – 94.2MHz (Recording)
Anorak Facts
- The Bayside phone number was 391143
- In November 1988, Bobby Gibbson and Richard Taylor hosted a special show looking at the history and the state of play of Dublin pirate radio
- The station broadcast around the clock leading to their December 31st closedown and for their final news bulletins they had features on stations that had (or were about to) closed
Resources for Centre Radio
On radiowaves fm
Listen to the station’s final broadcast in our Radio Retro section by tapping here
There’s more about their final day of broadcast in our 1988 Closedowns Special here
On Pirate.ie
There are more recordings and a great feature about the station’s final day here
On the WWW
‘All over northeast Dublin’: 30 years since the launch of Centre Radio by John Walsh