Two Walls and a Roof (45 page)

Under a great management team led by Colm O’Connaill, with a great group of broadcast
ers and professionals,
County Sound
and 96FM
grew and grew. We built new studios into Jack
’s old Majestic dance
hall, and I designed them in a way that the staff would be bathed in
both
light and good energy every hour that they worked there. I had a vision that if the broadcasters felt happy in their work environment, then they would come across as happy
to their listeners,
hold
ing
them for longer, giving the advertisers statistically a better chance of having their adds heard
. The buzz word for this holding
is known as ‘market share’ and we have one of the highest in the country. This vision was brought into reality by two of the most brilliant people I eve
r dealt with; John Mullane the e
ngineer and Mick Sheehan
,
a builder and craftsman of immeasurable vision and talent. Above all
,
those two people not alone saw what I was trying to achieve, but
they both
also enhanced it
,
while
still
surmounting every obstacle that came in their way
. T
oday I am very proud of the edifice we all created togeth
er in Mallow. I get a great sens
e of pri
de when a new staff member
tell
s me that they
love
the building, and the feeling they get while working there
,
not realizing that I had anything to do with it.

A
s time rolled on we had an ever-
increasin
g pot of money, and pretty soon
the station that the IRTC believed would be the first to fail, became one of the strongest stations in Ireland. Some y
ears later
this Cork consortium would mak
e a bid for the National Radio L
icence
,
and almost succeeded before finally being sold for over thirty million pounds to the huge media provider
,
Ulster Television P
lc. Unlike so many of the greed-
driven corporate companies we see today, our consortium gave one
million of their thirty million
s
back to their staff as a gesture of thanks. I may be wrong
,
but I believe this was unprecedented at the time
,
and I know of no other case still where it has happened. In a time when workers are not even being paid proper redundancy
,
there are many who could well take a leaf from our guys
’
books. The pirate radio that began with an idea from four local businessmen in Mallow, and that was first built in my kitchen
,
had succeeded beyond all expectations, and in line with my madness, instead of owning a quarter of the company I had just ten shares in it. These I had actually bought years
earlier unlike other engineers
who had argued for, and got
,
huge share options in similar situations. It was at that stage that I began to question what my life was all about, and how badly I had treated my own family
,
because of my addiction to radio. Only I was to blame though, as when I had onl
y asked for a penny, it would have been
foolish of me to expect to be given a pound
. G
uard Ryan’s
slap
in
the face
was still affecting me
,
but not alone me, it affected my family as well. It was long past the time for a rethink of my whole life
and that I began
.

As I write, we are now entering a completely new age. This is fast becoming the age of the
iPads, iP
ods, Podcasts, and A
p
ps. It’s actually easier for my son Adrian to listen to us now in Australia
than it is to hear u
s in some parts of our licensed area
, and I predict the demise of FM radio transmissions as we kno
w them. It will soon become both uneconomical and unneces
sary for a company to keep an FM
transmis
sion system operating
,
when the i
nternet will
offer a much bigger
audience at a tiny fraction of the cost. The new kings in broadcasting are now the IT people of this world, and I believe proof of that fact is not far away.
I am immensely proud that our i
nternet radio services are now being sent out into the world by the IT skills of my youngest son
,
Kyrl. He has persistently followed me into this radio work, despite my warnings a
gainst it. At this time he is both
the
Chief Engineer of the Limerick Radio station Live 95, and H
ead of IT of the very radio stations that started in his kitchen when he was but a baby. No one could possibly have foreseen such an event. Colm O’Connaill has long since left us and his protégée
, Ronan McManamy
is now in overall charge of the UTV Radio sector in Ireland. We in C
ork are still fortunate to have both Ronan
and an excellent CEO
in
Kieran McGeary
guiding our great team of
radio
fanatics. Kieran, a Waterford man,
has continued the growth of our radio stations
despite savage new competition
. He
continues to see the value of close co
-
operat
ion with our listening audience
because he was instrumental in bringing about yet another amazing radio appeal
. T
his time
it was
for the cancer services in the Cork Hospitals. I am very pleased to say that once again our radio work has eased the suffering of numerous children and adults from cancer, and over the p
ast years we must have raised close to two
million e
uros to help combat that
terrible
disease.  I have always maintained that the best radio people in Ireland are in Cork, though they are not necessarily Cork people, and the best team in radio is ours, but of course it is true to say that I would be biased. Commercial radio has been very good to me over the years
,
and it was while setting up a new
radio s
tation for Limerick that I b
egan my Internet c
hatting and ultimately found my second wife, an American called JoAnn
Elms
.

So as to explain how my life was to take on a new and dramatic turn for the better, I
need to return to Buttevant and
the year nineteen sixty five. I was then about fifteen years old and I had an extraordinary thing happen to me during a trip down the castle. This castle was owned by the Barry Clan in past history, and the town of Buttevant had been named after their war cry of
‘
Boutez an Avant
’
meaning ‘push forward’.  If you were trying to ‘get off’ with a girl, you took her on a trip down the
castle, and when I was fifteen
it was then a Mecca for teenagers. Getting off with a girl covered a multitude of possibilities, and ranged from hol
ding hands
to sex in various forms. I can say straight up that I never experienced the latter, but I did have some nice experiences there.

On the day in question my two friends
,
Hayes and Fowler
,
were heading down the castle because they both had girlfriend
s then. A
s we were all good friends I was asked to tag along for part of the walk at least. Unfortunately I did not have any girl on my arm and I remember feeling a bit odd in myself all that day
. I
t had nothing to do with my lack of female company, or so I thought
,
I just felt strange.

It was a most beautiful summer’s day with bright blue skies and a blazing hot sun warming our barely clad bodies. We were all so happy in those days with the hippie era beginning.  All of our friends were avid supporters of
The Beatles, T
he Stones, long hair and tie dye shirts, with the girls doing their best to defeat the rules and practices of Catholic Ireland.

Quite unlike what was believed of us at the time, none of us ever took drugs or drank alcohol. We were a very strange bunch of hippies indeed, but we rebelled in every other way we could, including the dress code
,
and our long hair was considered the worst in the town.

As we slipped through the old i
ron gates, I began to get an even stranger feeling about the day. A kind of sadness and yet elation began to come over me. First I thought it was because the lads had women and I did not, but that really was not it
. I just felt more and more odd
with every step we took. We walked and laughed and the lads hugged the girls and winked at me
. B
y then we had reached the actual castle. This was where we were parting as I was no longer welcome for the rest of their adventures
;
an understandable and accepted fact by me
. I would kill the time somehow
while they had their fun with the ladies. Pretty soon they disappeared into the privacy of rows o
f very large and very old trees
still there today, and I would not see them again for a long time.

I resigned myself to waiting at the actual castle, and decided to sit on a large windowsill which was big enough for me to comfortably stretch out on and enjoy the beautiful sunshine. After a time I began to feel real sorry for myself
,
especially in relation to the women situation, and my lack of them. It had been some time since I had a girlfriend
,
and even then she hadn’t lasted very long because I was more into electronics than women in those days
,
and
I
probably didn’t treat her right.

I believe I drifted off into a half sl
eep or into some strange trance-
like state, but I know I was neither fully awake nor fully asleep
. W
hile that feeling has often happened to me since, on that day I had never experienced anything like it before,
and it felt really weird but also fascinated
me.

Still in the trance-
like state I became more and more miserable and depressed in myself
,
feeling that I might never find a nice girl. I don’t know how long I was feeling sorry for myself, but I clearly remember feeling a kind of soft thought begin inside me and it said, “It
’
s all right John
,
don’t be upset about not having a girlfriend”. This was not an actual voice but seemed more like some kind of feeling inside my head, yet it did not seem to belong to me. I think I argued with the thought in my mind, becoming resentful at the intrusion, just wanting to be allowed
to
wallow in my own misery that day.

In hindsight, it felt like I was stuck between two different realities and time did not exist for me right then. It was easy to feel two versions of me existing at the same
time that day. One of me was la
ying across the
window
sill in a gloomy black state, and the other me was a softer
, gentler version that
seemed to be trying to help the one on the window sill.

Suddenly
,
right before my eyes and crystal clear, and just as solid looking as myself, I saw this image of a beautiful girl with long hair and a very broad smile. She was obviously not Irish and looked Indian, and I had never seen anyone like her in my life. She smiled at me and then quickly vanished. This image lasted just fractions of a second and I got such a shock that I actually fell off the window ledge in fright. I know I stared for a long time across at the Protestant Church, as that was the direction I was looking at when she appeared, and I so longed for her to come back. I was still there starin
g
and begging for her return when the lads came back, but she never did.

On numerous trips to the castle later that summer, and over the following years
,
I would try to see her again, but she never came back to me. I never told a soul either about that app
arition
because I felt I would be mocked to death by my friends, and it would confirm the local belief
that we three were
weirdo’s
, and I was definitely on hallucinating drugs.

From that day on a kind of
deep longing began in my heart
which I was not able to shake
,
but I hid it well. I could not get this girl out of my mind no matter wh
at I did. Every dance I went to
I would searc
h for her, and every film I saw
I would do the same. I clearly remember thinking that Ingrid Bergman was the closest the cinema ever got to her, but even she was not fully like her. At the time that incident made no sense to me, yet I knew that I longed to see her again.

Some years later I began to have a recurring dream where I was a very young Indian boy of about nine or ten. In this dream I played in a rock pool in among the trees, trying to catch minnows.  The sunshine gleamed in through the woods and sparkled on the water now and again, and the whole place seemed magical. A large
,
round
,
domed rock lay on the edge of the pool and a young Indian girl dressed in a long dress with moccasins looked on, and she seemed to be my girlfriend of the same age.

I would see myself trying to catch the tiny fish in my hands so as to give her one, but they always escaped, and she would laugh out loud each time I failed, especially when I fell over and got soaked in the stream.

In the dream I would get mad
,
and cupping my hands I’d shower her with this very cool water. Then laughing and screaming
,
she always ran off into the forest being closely chased by me. I
always
saw the sun
’s rays streaking in amongst us as we ran and laughed, and then
there would be a sudden flash of very bright
, white light just before the dream would abruptly end
.  For years and years this dream would happen to me randomly. It was not a nightmare
,
just a kind of friendly dream and I got quite used to it, almost expecting it. I knew it meant something but I had no idea what that dream was about.

The years rolled by. I was working in radio and married with three teenage children by
the time the i
nternet began. I was not k
een on the idea of getting the n
et at the start, as I couldn’t type, and I just did not see the
point of typing a conversation
that you could easily have had on the phone, even with the savage cost of phone calls.

Adrian
,
my eldest son
,
became an avid chatter though, and would be out in the
shed at home for half the night
talking to women in America because of the time difference. I would say at least
a year went by before I gave in
and decided to use th
is net for radio, space, and e
lectronics information.

On Christmas week nineteen ninety six, I bought the ‘Golden Pages of the Internet’
,
an amazing reference book with hundreds of thousands of web links, and descriptions as well. We had no Google in those days. It was
a gold
mine for me, and for a long time I used the book purely for research and loved this new information source.

One day
,
quite by accident
,
I came across a website called Powwow. The name intrigued me as all my life I had loved the Native Americans and innocently I thought this might be a website made by such people. A further thought crossed my mind that someone on the site may be able to throw some light on Uncle Johnnie
’s famous Cahill
from the Little Big Horn Battle.

I had no experience of any kind at this chatting though, and so I registere
d on the site with my real name
and real address
,
even putting down our phone number. This was insane of course
,
but I knew no better. I remember so clearly the night I first got on Powwow.  No sooner was I registered than I started to
get chat requests from American
s, and in particular from American women.

Everyone seemed very friendly and nice, but I was surprised at their fake names known as handles, and I also found out that none of them were Native Americans. Months went by and I developed a good friendship with a lady from Florida
,
who seemed to be wanting more than chats
. W
hen she suggested that I leave my wife and go live in America with her, alarm bells rang and I felt we should end our chatting. Before she did though, she told me how to search what was known as the ‘white pages’. These pages were a directory of those who were on line at any one time.  I had never been a searcher, as all the requests kept coming to me, so after ending with the Florida lady
,
a vacuum existed and I quite missed the chats. I decided to search for the Native Americans on the white pages.

Powwow used to have about half a million people on line at any given time, and I’m s
ure the night I began searching
it was no different.  The first thing I noticed was the really weird names p
eople were using on these pages
like Cyber King, Sex Goddess, and even more explicit names as well.  Then the penny dropped as to why I was always getting so many requests.
It was because I seemed normal
in comparison to most others, especially with an Irish name like Cahill, an
address and even a phone number. H
ow stupid can one get.

In a very short time, almost within minutes of my search, I noticed another normal name
; it was JoAnn and Jessica
Elms
.
I felt this might just be a mother and daughter looking to chat to other people from around the world
,
and according to her profile she was a ‘domestic engineer’. I figured she fixed washing machines
,
such was my ignorance of the net. Her profile also showed that she came from a small town in Missouri in the Mid West flanked by Huck Finn
’
s Mississippi
. This had to be a good sign, s
o I sent her a chat request. Nothing happened
, s
o I did it again, as it was her or the Cyber Kittens, and I was wary of that lot after the Florida woman. About to give up, I sent her one last request figuring that three requests were enough.

Ping went the little sound and her screen comes alive with the words “Hi” and a smiley symbol.  Immediately I felt some kind of an affinity with this person. I did not know why, at the time. We began to chat and laugh
, and
talk about our towns and our lives, our kids and partners
,
and hours went by in a flash. Before we said good bye, I asked i
f she would chat again tomorrow
because I liked her so much, and I felt she was very normal and friendly. By then I had wormed out of her what a domestic engineer was, and it was her term for a housewife
. S
he said it entailed mending socks not washing machines. She agreed to chat again, and over many months we began to develop a strong bond of friendship and only friendship at that stage.