The passing of a true television choice campaigner

Date Published: 17-Mar-2011

The passing last week of Pascal O’Brien will have brought back memories to many of one of the most sustained political battles ever waged in the west – the demand for multi-channel television in Galway at a time when the choice was RTÉ, or take up something like knitting in the evenings!

I’m going back to the Sixties and Seventies when Galway was what was known as ‘single channel land,’ even though there came a choice (of sorts!) when RTÉ introduced RTÉ 2, a channel intended to be a slightly lighter version of what was going out on RTÉ 1.

A small group led by people like Pascal O’Brien simply refused to accept this situation and set up the Galway Multi-Channel Television Campaign Committee to demand that Galway should have the same choice that was available in Dublin … and in most country towns and villages down the west coast. In other words, BBC and ITV signals available also.

The demand for multi-channel choice blended in well with Pascal O’Brien’s fanaticism about soccer … for the ‘big programme’ of a weekend then on television was BBC’s Match of the Day and it became the focus of the multi-channel choice campaigners as one of the most potentially most popular programmes which viewers were not getting.

It was presented by Jimmy Hill, featured the major game of the Saturday, and a pile of goals from other games, as well as a bit of an ‘apres match’ discussion chaired by Jimmy Hill.

Grown men were known to do strange things in a bid to see Match of the Day – for instance, video tapes were sent out into the country areas in Mayo and the programme recorded, but I know of two in Galway City who convinced themselves that they could see the darn thing!

You see, betimes, there was a bit of an overspill signal into Galway if the weather was good enough. The two worthies convinced themselves that they could see a picture (snowy!) as well as hear the sound – badly!

So, on a Saturday night, they would go downtown to the CYMS Hall, turn on the telly and watch that snowy picture … but they watched the picture in a mirror in which they convinced themselves they could see the picture more clearly than if they looked directly at the telly! It probably saved them as well from terminal eyestrain!

With desperation like that among the soccer fans, plus the fact that ordinary telly fans had only RTÉ 1 and RTÉ 2 to choose from, it was hardly any wonder that Pascal O’Brien and a small group of others formed their committee to agitate for multi-channel television and put the pressure on the politicians of the time like Posts and Telegraphs Minister Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien.

You see, they had RTÉ, BBC and ITV in Dublin because of an ‘overspill’ signal which was coming in from Wales and Northern Ireland and which could be picked up on an aerial, and a cable company – which was a subsidiary of RTÉ – had been licensed also to distribute the signal by cable in Dublin City.

Meanwhile, areas along the border counties and those in the Republic living close enough to The North, were also getting an overspill signal which was being put out from Belfast so that people in The North could get BBC and ITV.

Enterprising communities and individuals in areas right down through Roscommon, Mayo, Longford, Westmeath and adjoining counties, were picking up the BBC and ITV signals, and boosting the signal onwards with their own system of makeshift transmitters.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.