Pirate Predator: 01 - The Electrician
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What explosive actions defined Eamon Cook's early years?
In the summer of 1952, a 15-year-old boy in Dublin discovered he could spark an explosion by mixing three cheap ingredients from a local chemist. After a week of practice, he prepared a pipe bomb using an old bike frame and hid it in nearby waste ground. Then, one evening, this 15-year-old and two friends snuck into Glasnevin Cemetery on Dublin's north side, forced the lock on the O'Connell Tower in the graveyard, went inside, and a boy lit a candle to his creation. Just before midnight, Garthy arrived to investigate reports of a light in the 180-foot-tall tower. As they reached the gate, the bomb detonated, shattering the tower's windows. The 15-year-old mastermind behind this explosion was Eamon Cook.
He already had a criminal record by then, and Eamon Cook was about to grow up to be a very, very dangerous man. I'm Peter Mulrhyne. From RTE Documentary on 1, this is Pirate Predator. Episode 1, The Electrician. This story started for me in 1981, when I was 19 years old. I was going to write a book about one of the coolest underground things in Ireland at the time. The pirate radio scene began back in the 1960s, when only one radio station was allowed broadcast in Ireland, Radio Eireann. Which was fine if you wanted to listen to news, poetry or programmes intended for, well, anyone over the age of 60, really. But if you were young, like me... and wanted to listen to pop music or anything remotely cool or in fashion, you tuned in to illegal radio stations.
They played music that young people actually wanted to hear. And that is what led 19-year-old me to drive my Honda 50 to the door of the biggest pirate radio station in Ireland.
Radio Dublin.
And the man who ran that station was Eamon Cook, a shabby little man who smelled of the Rothman cigarettes he constantly smoked. The trail was blazed by Radio Dublin, run by Eamon Cook from a terraced house in Inchicore. Eamon Cook was one of the original pirates. Now he's up the mast again with his eye on a prize. Back then, he was revered by many as a kind of folk cult hero, the radio rebel.
In the meantime, by continuing to broadcast, he's facing the possibility of fines of up to £20,000 and or two years in prison.
But there was a darkness behind Cook, or Captain Cook, as he liked to be called. So that all the little secrets in my past are no longer a secret. Eamon Cook, as it turned out, had many secrets and many victims.
Some news just in to us now from the court. 66-year-old Eamon Captain Cook, the founder of pirate radio station Radio Dublin, has been jailed for 10 years for sexually abusing four young girls in the 1970s and 1980s. One of his victims called him one of the most evil and perverse human beings... I've wanted to make this series for a long time.
to understand how one of Ireland's most prolific ever abusers got away with it for so long. Cook used Radio Dublin to get access to children. He was a predator in plain sight. Ireland's Jimmy Savile. And his reign of abuse went on for decades, right under everyone's noses. Children will say one thing to one person, and they'll say one, then other thing to another person. So there you are. Which is the truth? Nobody knows. But the story of Eamon Cook begins much earlier than when I first met him in the 1980s. Cook and I actually grew up in the same area, Glasnevin, on Dublin's north side. Now, who am I or what am I? Yes, I'm born here in Dublin. This audio comes from a 1978 pirate radio recording, an interview with Eamon Cook.
Educated over in St. Vincent's over in Glasnevin. After various jobs, not too many since then.
Okay, so first port of call was the General Registry Office in Dublin.
Researcher and genealogist Damien O'Sullivan is helping me take a look back into Eamon Cook's early life.
Okay, so Eamon Cook was born on the 4th of November 1936. He was the firstborn child to his parents, Patrick and Anne. And they actually christened him Edward Eamon Christopher Cook. Quite a long name. So he was one of four children. So Eamon had one younger brother and two younger sisters.
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