Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What warning is given before the episode begins?
A warning before we begin. This series contains reference to sexual abuse. A pirate radio station peddling its daily wares. There are now at least 20 such illegal stations around the country. As the 1980s dawned in Ireland, change was in the airwaves. Thank you very much indeed, Brendan, and welcome to the first show on Radio 2.
Chapter 2: How did pirate radio stations change the landscape in Ireland during the 1980s?
If Eamon Cook and Radio Dublin had led the Irish pirate scene in the late 70s, their success with younger audiences spurred others into action, including the national broadcaster.
Hello.
Yeah, well, we've been waiting for an all-day nationwide music station for a long time. Now we have it. RTE launched just its second radio station in its history, Radio 2, now 2FM. And a new breed of super-pirate radio stations were about to rewrite the rulebook. The best music...
Radio Dublin was still broadcasting around the clock on its AM frequency, and Eamon Cook continued his weekly news show. I was looking there through the papers just a short while before the news to see if I'd met just an hour or so. I got a quick couple of glances at it.
But when the super pirate stations embraced FM, well, it's like the radio waves of Ireland turned from black and white to technicolour.
Super Stereo
A new sound for a new decade. Change was in the air for Eamon Cook too. The trail was blazed by Radio Dublin, run by Eamon Cook from a terraced house in Inchicore.
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Chapter 3: What impact did Eamon Cook have on Radio Dublin and the pirate radio scene?
He was leaving his home on Starsfield Road and taking everything, including Radio Dublin, with him to a new building not far away.
He's gradually extended his operation.
Audiences and advertisers have followed. Radio Dublin showed that there was money to be made and that anyone could make it. It was illegal, of course. Cook's new home at 58 Inchacore Road was a ramshackle detached Victorian bungalow on its own grounds with plenty of room for the 100-foot transmitter aerial to tower over the property.
The place was a little on the rough side with big holes in the floor. The same floor was also seemingly the main ashtray in the house. This description of Radio Dublin was written by a visiting English journalist in 1981. The station looked like a local hangout for all and sundry. Some of the guys in the living room were throwing burning bits of paper at each other.
There were tiles missing off the roof, the place was in absolute bits. A lot of the house was derelict. This is Neil Hayes, the Radio Dublin DJ we met in our last episode, together with his photographs of Jimmy Savile. The transmitter room was secure, and it was secured by a big steel door. That was also his bedroom, wasn't it? That was his bedroom. That's where he lived.
That's where his heating came from, the transmitter. No one was allowed into Eamon's room. One day, when Eamon Cook was out, Neil was able to sneak in and take photos of Cook's bedroom, which looks, well, dangerous. It was quite a smelly room. There was a bed in the corner, definitely a bed that hadn't seen sheets or duvets changed in an awful long time. Just kind of mouldy,
It had electric wires on the window to prevent entrance, like an electric fence running across the window, which I have pictures of here. Eamon Cook didn't just electrify the windows. He did the same to the metal doors.
When they put steel doors into the station, they used to tell the electrician, don't come near the place because those doors are electrocuted. If you touch them, you'll get electrocuted.
It made his home on the Radio Dublin studios a bit of a fortress, protected from the authorities. The window would have been wired up to mains. That's dangerous. Well, it's dangerous for someone trying to get through the window. Cook weaponized electricity.
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Chapter 4: How did Eamon Cook's personal life affect his operations at Radio Dublin?
And of course, I was locked into the fact that my parents didn't know. So because my parents didn't know, there was no one I could go to to say, look, this is really, I'm finding this harder and harder to deal with as I get older.
Mary, who we met in our last episode, also struggled through her teenage years after her abuse alongside Siobhan and Anne.
I wasn't offered any counselling at the time because I never spoke about it. But in my own way, I developed a different thing where I would constantly clean. I'd be very, very OCD. And I don't ever remember being like that until I got into my teenagers, until I realised what actually happened to me. And then I wanted everything clean. I'd scrub my hands raw. I'd wash myself.
That in itself, I had to come to terms with and understand why I was like that. But I didn't know that that was a reaction to what had happened to me.
When I arrived into Radio Dublin's studios as a 19-year-old in 1981, I'd no idea any of this was going on. I'd come to interview Eamon Cook as part of a book I was writing on pirate radio. Thinking back now, I don't actually remember any of what he said to me when I first met him, but I do remember the scene very clearly. The studio was dark. Cook sipped tea from a mug.
Shane smoked and stared at the ground. To my right, a slight girl was sunk into a beaten up sofa. She had a child in her lap. I now know that was Cook's first child and the young mother was only 16 or 17 years old. But back then, I just thought it was strange and a bit odd that a young girl and a baby were there when I was interviewing Cook, which is probably why it stuck with me.
Don't forget, at this stage, Cook was still married to his second wife, Joan. She told me one day that she was the second wife of...
And I said, OK, what happened to the first wife then? She fell down the stairs and he found her at the end of the stairs one morning. She thinks she broke her neck.
And I thought, OK. It must have been a really strange time for Joan when Cook fathered his first child with that young girl. Because Joan was still living with him. DJ Sean Meaney.
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Chapter 5: What measures did Cook take to protect his radio station from authorities?
And they said, you look for attempted murder. And I said, what? It wasn't me. All I did was, as I said, introduce Amy Cook to me and that was it. That's as far as it went.
Five Dublin men were charged in connection with the setting on fire of a house on the South Circular Road on November 23rd last.
Somebody grasped because they got the whole lot of us. Throughout 1985, Cook and the four men he'd involved in doing his dirty work awaited trial. Radio Dublin kept on broadcasting, with Eamon Cook still at the helm. And Cook kept on abusing children. So listeners out there, and if you support Radio Dublin, we do like you to listen in. By all means, ring us in for a request.
Right into the station here. Let's know what you think of this station. Some of your letters in this week, man, the language. I couldn't read them out over the air. Disturbingly, since this series began publishing, we've been contacted by someone who I've spoken with and who has told us the following...
I know that in the mid-1980s, Eamon Cook and an associate from Radio Dublin routinely targeted competing radio stations, cutting down their aerials or sabotaging their equipment. More alarmingly, I recently learned that Cook's accomplice was suspected of child abuse. and came under guard investigation before taking his own life, a fact I've since confirmed with his family.
A third man, frequently in their company but not involved in Radio Dublin, has also since been exposed for exploiting children. I suspect there could even have been a wider circle of offenders involved. Either way, I believe Eamon Cook at times operated within a paedophile ring, where those involved were likely covering each other's tracks, trading victims or abusing them together.
While we cannot independently corroborate this information, the caller did provide us with those men's names, together with other details that sadly do add up. We also got a tip-off of another paedophile ring around Thomas Street in the 1960s, again with names, including Eamon Cooke.
Throughout 1986, Cook awaited trial on charges relating to that arson attack on the home of the mother of his first child. 1986 was also the same year Anne decided to break her silence around Cook's abuse. She confided in Cheval's mother, who was shocked to learn Anne's family didn't know, and urged her to tell them.
I went home and I called my dad at work. And I said, Dad, I need to talk to you. Can you come home? He was in that front door within 10 minutes. I stood in front of him in the kitchen and said to him, Dad, I need to tell you that Eamon Cook abused me. He just guided me to the couch, said, sit there, you're okay. He went out, he made a call to the rape crisis center.
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Chapter 6: How did Cook's control over his victims manifest in their lives?
We were all there. It was me... As the mastermind behind the attack, the judge wanted to deal with Eamon Cook separately two weeks later. However, the judge did hand down sentences to George and his accomplices that day.
Two men who admitted setting fire to a flat with the intention of injuring a man who was friendly with the former girlfriend of Captain Eamon Cook, the owner of Radio Dublin, were given a four-year and a three-year suspended sentence at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court yesterday. Two other men who admitted conspiring to cause grievous bodily harm were given one-year suspended sentences.
That newspaper article, published on October 23rd, 1986, is the exact same day Dublin schoolboy Philip Kearns went missing. A case which is still unresolved.
Gardaí in Dublin have appealed for help to trace a missing 13-year-old schoolboy who was last seen leaving his home in Rathfarnham after lunch on Thursday to walk back to school.
Philip's story quickly drew huge media attention, with his mother and father appearing on RTE five days after he first disappeared.
It was completely out of character for him not to be home. He always came home within a quarter of an hour or 20 minutes, unless he had football or unless he had any other activity or, you know.
What do you think has happened, from what you know already? Well, my feeling is that he wasn't the kind of boy that would run away or try to run away. He was much too quiet and he wasn't in any way self-assured or that sort of thing. The only thing I think somebody or something must have, for whatever coercion or trickery, taken him, you know?
Today, the Philip Kearns case remains one of Ireland's most high-profile unsolved mysteries. And if you Google Eamon Cook, his name will appear as being connected. But back on October 23rd, 1986, the day Philip went missing, Eamon Cook was likely reeling. At that stage he was awaiting the decision of a judge as to whether he was going to be sentenced on charges of firebombing.
Gareth O'Callaghan DJ'd at Radio Dublin when starting out in radio. The case had been adjourned because the judge wanted to consider whether he would... send Cook to jail or whether it would be a suspended sentence. Gareth knew Eamon Cook. He is also a second cousin to Philip Kearns.
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