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New Radio Centre Completed: April 1971
The new Radio Centre at Montrose was completed in April 1971 and live radio broadcasts from Montrose began on 24 September 1973. The move began from the GPO in O'Connell Street, which had been the home of radio since 1929.
In June 1969, work had begun on the Radio Centre. Planning and equipping the building took many years. When it was opened in September 1973, Paddy Downey wrote in his television column that "the great pyramids of Egypt took longer to put up but they didn't have cranes and that sort of handy stuff in those primitive times".
Henry Street had been the main centre for radio broadcasting in Ireland since 1929. At the time of the move to Montrose, Mervyn Wall commented that "staff were very attached to their premises in the GPO...radio operated from two long corridors and some additional rooms never built or intended for broadcasting...it was heartbreaking to be running a broadcasting service from a building never intended for the purpose...". An even less charitable view of the Henry Street "corridor" had been taken by the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who told a reporter that "it looks like a public convenience".
On the other hand, there were some hard views about the new Montrose building also, despite its open-plan offices and hi-tech studios - Tommy O'Brien wrote, "Montrose is too clinical, too cold for my old-fashioned taste. After a while I found myself sighing for the higgledy-piggledy rabbit warren of Henry Street: for its very warm atmosphere, for its comforting homeliness".
In 1973, the famous long tiled corridor was still there: Terry O' Sullivan reported that "there was a party in the corridor last evening and all the young voices filled the place with rare laughter". The move from Henry Street was a long drawn-out affair; it took three years to disentangle all the technical and programme strands of radio from the GPO building. For
example, the transfer of the sound library involved the removal of 18 tons of tapes, disks and archive material. This consisted of 40,000 long-play records, 11,000 singles and 4,500 tapes.
On 22 September 1973, the "Cork Examiner" reported: "RTÉ Radio Switches to Donnybrook- Live broadcasting from the new RTÉ Radio Centre will begin next Monday".
The first scheduled programmes were "Rogha Ceoil", "Music on the Move", and "Morning Airs". The Henry Street Studios were gradually abandoned. Apart from continuity announcements, transmissions from Henry Street had ceased by May 1974. At that stage, all but three of the thirteen new studios in Montrose were operational. By 1976, Henry Street was a broadcasting memory.
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