Dan Joe Kelleher and the incredible TV station he set up in 1980s' Co Cork
Dan Joe Kelleher in Carriganima, near Macroom, Co Cork, with some of his equipment and archive of 40 years of local tv recordings. Picture: Dan Linehan
A broadcasting service “of the people, by the people, for the people” has, to repurpose the words of Abraham Lincoln, been the life’s work of Dan Joe Kelleher, the farmer who founded his own television station.
Four decades of Dan Joe’s life have been dedicated to filming the cultural heritage of rural Cork, to recording its songs and stories, its spiritual and agricultural life, and sporting highs and lows.
The presence of Dan Joe, whose one-man operation expanded into two local television services with their own panel of presenters, ensured everyday life in the hinterlands of Macroom and Millstreet was recorded as it happened.
Present is soon past, however, and over time Dan Joe has found himself becoming the custodian of a vast archive of recordings, the rooms of his home in Carriganima becoming a floor-to-ceiling walk-in library bursting with VHS tapes and DVDs of concerts and community commemorations.
A man ahead of his time in the early 1980s when he founded his local television station, Dan Joe, now in his 80s, is looking to the future once more and has embraced YouTube as a means of preserving, digitising, and disseminating his recordings.
The online release of each vintage video from his catalogue of people and place evokes for relatives and friends of those featured, personal memories of departed loved ones and days of youth. Beyond the local significance, however, the breadth of material covered by Dan Joe gives the archive a wider cultural importance as musical, literary, and linguistic gems are unearthed.
“I think the history of songs and music in the area was important to record,” says Dan Joe, whose motivation was “to establish a station in my own area for the culture of the people and for the people to get a chance to be on television”.
The subjects of his television programmes, the singers, musicians, and dancers who performed in scoraíocht gatherings, were for the most part members of the local community who, like Dan Joe, never sought or received financial reward.
“I never got any payment. It was not for myself but for the community I was doing it,” he says. “I was happy doing it and the people were so good [as performers and presenters]; you didn’t have to ask them twice. They prepared the programmes for me.”
A local committee also rowed in with fundraising, though Dan Joe self-financed most of the costly equipment for the station, a labour of love from the time he first decided to erect a mast on the hillside above his home village.
“I had no experience,” he adds. “And I had no training whatsoever.” How then, does a farmer go about establishing his own television station in the Cork countryside?
In the shadow of the Mullaghanish transmitter and at a time when viewers had few alternatives to RTÉ’s output, he says “foreign reception was very interesting for me - getting television from different countries”.
Researching through a specialist electronics magazine, he decided to build a satellite dish using mesh, setting it up on the side of Mushera Mór, the highest of the Boggeragh mountains. The first broadcast he picked up was from a TV station in north-west Russia, and Dan Joe was hooked.
His next step was to set up his own mast, a 25ft pole with interconnected aerials, on the elevated land of his neighbour Willie Riordan in Carriganima, and over time he established transmitters on the hills near both Millstreet and Macroom.
“That started me off and it worked,” says Dan Joe. “I funded it myself. I said it was the best way to do it because if you were looking for grants you’d be waiting forever.” The programmes - which by 1985 included the filming of a full-scale TV drama series, The Strangers, in Carrigadrohid - involved a community meitheal of presenters who Dan Joe says were “naturals - they were as good as any trained presenter and they had no experience in the world”.
One of those closely involved as a presenter was Brendan O’Brien, who recalls the range of “culture, music, shows, pantomimes, musical drama, everything that went on in [Macroom theatre] the Briery Gap - they would have been interviewed by local television”.
He sees the LTV archive as a successor of sorts to the work of the Irish Folklore Commission in collecting and preserving the country’s cultural heritage.
“It’s wonderful that it exists,” says Brendan. Though Dan Joe “consistently refused to stand in front of the camera himself”, he “went around to the local houses, the pubs, the festivals, he recorded Irish dancing, beautiful sean-nós singers, poetry readings, the Irish language spoken, he recorded the songs in Irish and in English, the folk songs of the people”.
“Those folk songs were infused with good humour, history, sadness too of course, and great wit and storytelling,” he adds, citing among them former milkman Connie O’Riordan as a “living embodiment” of comic song-writing tradition.
“Dan Joe also has a very deep faith and was always very keen to broadcast religious ceremonies of all kinds. All of this stems from Dan Joe’s values,” adds Brendan, who says what was important to Dan Joe in his choice of recording subjects was “everything that is good, everything that is natural, and everything that gives vent to the culture, the language, the traditions of the Irish”.
The archive runs to an estimated 3,000 programmes, a portion of them previously made available in Macroom Library, but many remain in their original VHS format or were converted to DVDs which are themselves in danger of technological obsolescence.
“The preservation of this archive has been a huge dilemma and a cause of great concern to Dan Joe himself because of the changing technology over the years,” says Brendan.
While YouTube has provided the means for Dan Joe and his sons to share the archive in a new format, Covid lockdown ensured receptive online viewers.
“It was the right time to start,” says Dan Joe. “I was afraid people might reject it, in the sense that they mightn’t like going back in time.” Reviving the past “could be maybe emotional”, but the response from Ireland and abroad has been nothing but positive. “I think it was very important to have recorded the local history, the people that have passed away since,” he says.
Still busy digitising the hundreds of remaining recordings, did he anticipate their online popularity? “Never in my wildest dreams,” he says.
Though his transmitters have been out of action since suffering storm damage in 2019, Dan Joe would love to see his local television dream continued by others with “new ideas”.
“Forty years is a long time,” he says. “I was happy doing it and I like to see the people happy with the programmes. I was doing it for the local area, with transmitters in the mountains, but LTV is not mine - it belongs to the community.”
- See: YouTube LTV Services, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzCqinC2x2hQv7-CewlNJSA/videos
