RTÉ 100: From shortwave broadcasts at the GPO to push notifications

When Éamon de Valera launched Ireland’s television service on New Year’s Eve 1961, he welcomed the new medium while warning that it could profoundly influence public thought and action.

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Never before was there in the hands of men an instrument so powerful, to influence the thoughts and actions of the multitudes.

RTÉ News is revisiting that transformation as part of its centenary coverage. Early broadcasts used grainy black-and-white pictures, but they brought viewers closer to events and revealed the technology behind television. A 1965 documentary showed studio cameras and film-editing equipment, explaining how telecine converted film into images that television sets could receive.

The new service quickly became a fixture in Irish homes. Its newsroom hired journalists from newspapers because, as former Director of News Wesley Boyd later explained, print journalism was the only established source of television news staff at the time.

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Through this eye, the telecine machine, we shall see film, any kind of film turned into pictures that our television sets can receive.

During its first decade, RTÉ News carried events such as the 1966 farmers’ protest into living rooms across Ireland. Farmers walked hundreds of miles from County Cork to Dublin, producing images that became the subject of national discussion and drew objections from the government.

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The journalists we employed, without exception, came from newspapers and they came from that print tradition. There was no other source of journalist employment at the time.

The people delivering the reports also became familiar figures. Charles Mitchel, an actor hired in 1961, became one of RTÉ’s first prominent television newsreaders and a household name. Fellow newsreader Andy O’Mahony recalled that letters regularly arrived at the newsroom for Mitchel, who enjoyed his newfound fame. The anniversary series follows that development through later changes, from shortwave broadcasting at the General Post Office to instant updates on the RTÉ News app.

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Charles Mitchel loved it.