Chris Carey The English pirate radio operator who shook up the staid world of Irish broadcasting is remembered by Liam Collins (May 9th 2008)
HAROLD Christopher Carey was a colourful Englishman of Irish extraction who thrived in the buccaneering years of the early 1980s when the 'Irish solution' to youth culture was to allow illegal pirate radio stations to mushroom around Dublin.
Run by enthusiastic amateurs, they were soon competing with, and winning audiences and revenue from, the staid State broadcaster RTE, whose idea of catering for young people was a dull diet of Mart & Market, classical music and highbrow history.
Chris Carey, as he was known, claimed to have jumped on the last supply ship permitted to go to Radio Caroline in 1967, and along with Ronan O'Reilly, founder of the legendary 'pirate' station, broadcast for its last few days at anchor in the English Channel under the name of Spangles Muldoon.
An intrepid 'Del Boy', he worked in Radio Luxembourg and then computers before washing up in Portmarnock, Co Dublin, where he got a job with Robbie Robinson running 'Sunshine Radio'.
In early 1981, Chris Carey founded Radio Nova in a Georgian house in Herbert Street before moving to the Dublin mountains, where he ran the station from a former 'country club' called Green Acres. Within a few years, he was driving a Rolls Royce, claiming to take in £20m a year in advertising and a fixture on Dublin's 'celebrity scene' of the era.
They were buccaneering times, and he added spice to the image when his marriage to Remy Steffen broke up and he took up with, and later married, station presenter -- and very respectable daughter of a south Dublin doctor -- Sybil Fennell, with whom he lived until his untimely death during a holiday in Mallorca 10 days ago.
At the height of his career, Carey was loud, ambitious and full of fun. "I've got enough newspaper coverage to wallpaper the Green Room of the Shelbourne Hotel," he boasted during a 'staff outing' to Dublin's fanciest restaurant, The Mirabeau.
Andrew Hanlon, now head of news at TV3, former publisher Mike Hogan and newsreaders Bryan Dobson and Ken Hammond, and many other well-known broadcasters started in or passed through Radio Nova.
When Minister Ray Burke eventually took on RTE and legalised commercial radio, there was almost a vengeful attitude to the original pirates, with neither Robinson nor Carey getting a licence. His presentation was honest, but not the kind of thing civil servants wanted to hear. When he was asked what the Irish content of his station would be, he answered "a focal a day" and promised to keep news to a minimum.
After his bid failed, he left Ireland and was involved in a number of ventures in radio in England. He lived in some style in Weybridge in Surrey, in the south of England and eventually ended up in jail after becoming what was described in court as "Europe's leading smartcard pirate." BSkyB claimed to have lost £30m to his counterfeiting operation which made 'television decoders' and was run from a unit in Dun Laoghaire Shopping Centre.
Carey denied the charges. "I only went along with it in a confused state because it made people happy," he said, after sacking his legal team and conducting his own defence.
He was sentenced to four years in Ford open prison and when an appeal against his conviction failed he fled to Spain where he was later joined by his family.
Chris Carey died of complications after suffering a stroke on the island of Mallorca.