Form PREM14A GAN Ltd For: Dec 15 streetinsider.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from streetinsider.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Commercial Radio was the ‘gold rush’ of the late 1980s, and everyone and anyone wanted a piece of the action. There were rock stars, impresarios, lawyers, sportsmen, public relations gurus, stockbrokers and socialites, all prospecting for a licence to print money. These licences, awarded by the Independent Radio & Television Commission (IRTC), were cheap and they held the promise of easy money for the influential, the fortune and the favoured. The reality turned out to be a little different. The road to radio riches was eventually littered with casualties, but only after the initial euphoria had worn off. The way it worked was that the ‘movers and shakers’ formed themselves into competing groups, appeared before hearings in the National Concert Hall in Dublin and eventually the licences were doled out. If you weren’t involved you weren’t really a player in the Dublin financial/entertainment scene of the time.