Near FM Celebrates Its Twentieth Anniversary

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JACK BYRNE, one of the founders of NearFM chats to John Healy about the station’s beginnings.

North Dublin community radio station Near FM, which marks its 20th anniversary next week, had very humble beginnings. Its first studio was an empty car crate, wallpapered with egg boxes, located in a vacant school dormitory in Coolock.
From the outset, however, its ambitions were great: the creation of a “citizens’ radio”, no less, which would put media power in the hands of the people.
“I wasn’t reading Chomsky and Stuart Hall at that stage,” says Jack Byrne, who co-founded the station and remains one of the energies behind it. “I just had a sense we needed our own media.” A few years earlier, Byrne set up a food co-operative in the area but its development had been snuffed out by the multiples. This provided one of the triggers for Near FM, he says.

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