Chapter 1: What is the story behind Eamon Cook and the Pirate Predator podcast?
Pirate Predator is a new RT podcast series that tells the definitive story of Eamon Cook, a man of many faces who on one hand became a cult figure in pirate radio in the 70s and 80s, while on the other was one of Ireland's most prolific child sexual abusers.
He was also questioned in connection with the case of Philip Cairns, the 13-year-old who disappeared 30 years ago in 1986 while walking to school in 40 years ago, excuse me, while walking to school in Dublin. The first episode launches today. Presenter and producer Peter Mulryan joins me from our Cork studio to tell me about it. Morning, Peter.
Chapter 2: Why did Peter Mulryan decide to tell Eamon Cook's story now?
Good morning. This is a very disturbing story. What brought you to it? Why did you decide you wanted to tell this story now?
Well, it goes back to early 80s. I was in college and I decided to do a project on radio and pirate radio was the most interesting thing in Ireland at the time. So I met Eamon Cook many times while I was working on that. And later on, I turned it into a book called Radio Radio, which is kind of a first pass at pirate radio or the history of pirate radio.
But then I left and I went to the UK and when I came back, maybe 20 years later, Eamon Cook had gone from being this sort of cult myth figure to being a paedophile. It always struck me as how did that happen? How was he hiding in plain sight for so long?
Yeah. And he was, as you say, a cult figure. And pirate radio at the time, it was very exciting. It was very attractive to many young people.
Yeah, I mean, it was huge. It's really hard to kind of explain just how exciting pirate radio was. I was trying to explain it to my 17-year-old the other day, and his response was, yeah, Dad, what's radio? That's how far we've come in a single generation. And at the time, there was just radio airing, just one radio station. Until the pirates came along and suddenly it was music 24-7.
I mean, it was a radical change from, I guess, De Valera's Ireland.
Yeah, and Cook was a key figure in that with Radio Dublin.
Yeah, he was a key mover from the late 70s into the early 80s. Radio Dublin was the biggest pirate station in the country and he was the right man in the right place at the right time.
So you met him. You were young, obviously.
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Chapter 3: How did Eamon Cook become a cult figure in pirate radio?
But he was decidedly odd.
And then, as you say, when you moved back from the UK, he was being tried for abusing children. That must have been a huge shock.
Yeah, I mean, I was sitting in Beaulieu's. I was over making a documentary for the BBC and I looked up and he was the front page of a newspaper. And that's the first time I'd ever thought about this guy for 20 odd years. And that's when sort of this documentary kind of took shape in my head. how did this happen? And actually, I'd met this man.
Yeah. When we think of child abuse in Ireland, we often think about institutional settings, obviously, but this was completely different.
Yeah, that's the other fascinating thing, is literally he brought the accusations of child abuse into the public domain way back in 1978. It's not like we didn't know something was going on. We knew for a very, very long time.
OK, well, we do actually have a clip of that, of Eamon Cook addressing those charges. I'm going to play some of that in a minute, but can you explain exactly why he was addressing the issue?
What happened was, is that in 78, the disc jockeys in Radio Dublin got wind that something was up. They didn't have a smoking gun, but they had suspicions. So they, led by James Dillon, who was a DJ there, there was a staff walkout, everyone just left the station. and set up a new radio station. When Cook comes back, literally everyone's gone.
To be fair to the people who left, they never said why they left. They just said there was a difference of opinion.
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Chapter 4: What were the circumstances surrounding Cook's transformation into a criminal?
So it was Cook who very interestingly brought the accusations into the public domain. And he did that in a rather long and rambling two-hour broadcast one Sunday lunchtime.
OK, we're going to take a listen to that now. This is a clip from episode three of the podcast. It's the now infamous interview or monologue that Eamon Cook gave on Radio Dublin in 1978 concerning child sex abuse allegations against him and a warning that this clip contains the voice of Eamon Cook.
They can deny them, certainly. They can deny them, like myself, until I am blue in the face. But, as everyone out there would say, well, there's no smoke without a little bit of fire.
I pointed my transmitter at the Dublin mountains, pressed play and record. In my wildest dreams, I could never have anticipated what I heard next.
Yes, they were the allegations laid down against me personally. that children were allowed into this radio station here and were indecently molested. Or molested, that was the actual allegation. All I could do, of course, was deny it and ask for proof.
That's chilling, Peter. It really is. And in fact, those allegations that were made, they were all completely true.
They were completely true. Well, what's very interesting about Eamon Cook was his ability to rewrite history as it unfolded. So by going on the air and saying what he did, he reframed the conversation. He became the victim. And so when I did the book, for example, I put down his version of events in the book.
And then 20 years later, when he's in court, his defence used bits of my book in his defence.
Oh.
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