Paul Hopkins: How my love affair has me turned on and tuned in...

One of my earliest memories is of my brother and me playing on the dining-room floor, while my mother was ironing. It was the first time I realised radio existed. Women’s Hour was broadcasting from the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4) on the old wireless in the corner beside my father’s banjo. This was obviously before Radio Eireann began day-time broadcasting. I always wondered why it was called a wireless, when there was a wire and a plug which had to go in to the socket in the wall.

I have had a lifetime love affair with radio in all its guises. A sometimes inaudible Radio Luxemburg and then the pirate Radio Caroline accompanied me through my teenage years, while ‘talk radio’ has been a constant in my life as a newspaper man. The great and consumate broadcasters have been by my side — Gay Byrne, Terry Wogan, Gerry Ryan, Pat Kenny, David Hanly, Rodney Rice, John Humphreys, John Bowman, Cathal MacCoille, Jane Garvey, Marian Finucane, Mary Wilson, Joe Duffy and, more recently, Katie Hannon, Claire Byrne and the wonderfully inquiring Sarah McInerney.

Indeed, my first byline as a rookie reporter was an interview with the pirate operators — and one Declan Meehan — of Dublin’s Radio Melinda for the Irish Press, while I did some, somewhat furtive, reporting for radio when I found myself in the middle of a war in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in the late Seventies.

Any given day can find me going from RTE Radio 1 to BBC Radio 4 to keep abreast of news or switching to digital Radio 6 for contemporary music or Radio 3 for an evening of Pucinni, finally falling asleep to the global coverage that is the Beeb’s World Service, often in the company of our own Fergal Keane.

I like, too, that radio demands much more of my imagination than does TV, as with a play or the reading of a book or the performance of an opera or a comedy show.

While it’s difficult to find an area of life that hasn’t been affected by the coronavirus, the industry that is radio is having a boom time during the pandemic, no pun intended.

While commuting and days in the office are but memories for most, many of us have found companionship, solace, laughter and, yes, much-needed information, from the world of radio. Our hosts feel like colleagues or familiar old friends, delivering uplifting moments when we have needed them most. I have laughed (Oliver Callan) and cried (the mother and baby stories on Liveline) my way through the lockdowns and, though effectively isolating alone, have never found myself alone once I have my trusted radio swtiched on.

Ireland traditionally has a comparatively high radio listenership — and ditto with podcasts, the higest in the EU, according to Reuters — but the pandemic has seen a dramatic rise in the number turning to radio, more often on their smartphones. The lastest Joint National Listenership Research (JNLR) figures show a surge for news and current affairs in the last nine months across all national and local stations.

Interstingly, there are signs of a ‘fall-off’ for music stations such as 2fm as disruption to daily routines and ongoing remote working habits have taken their toll on programmes that rely on a regular commuter audience. Tellingly, listening across all formats is down before 8am but has grown after 8am with many mid-morning shows attracting new or lapsed listeners.

Morning Ireland, the country’s most listened-to programme now has 491,000 listeners, up 62,000 in the past 12 months, thought to be its highest audience in 17 years.

Joe Duffy’s Liveline, which memorably covered such lighter topics as ‘the sex’ in the truly wonderful drama Normal People as well as, and often poignant, stories from the fallout of the pandemic and now the mother and baby saga, has added 41,000 year on year, bringing its audience to 404,000 — its biggest in a long time.

When decades ago television came to live among us, many said it would be the death knell for radio. How wrong they were. The last two decades in particular have seen radio enjoy a renaissance unequaled by any other medium. TV may well give everyone an image but radio gives birth to a million images in a million minds.

For me, the power of radio is not that it speaks to the millions but that it speaks intimately and privately to each and every one of those millions.

- Read Paul Hopkins every Tuesday in the Meath Chronicle