Do you remember the 1980’s, they were not great years for many people, and at the end of the 1980s a new spark emerged.  After some years of talk, conversation and negotiation Local Radio was legalised in Ireland and local stations started to broadcast in 1989.  Fr. Joe Dargan, then Secretary General of CMRS, invited the Leaders of all the Congregations to come together to address the question ‘what can we do to support religious broadcasting on local radio’.  A second meeting was held where leaders who were interested, together with people from their congregations who had interest or skill, or both came together.  Arising out of that meeting the first tentative steps were taken and 3R Productions, 3R standing for Religious Resources for Radio, was established.  The Jesuits, Dominicans, Divine Word Missionaries, Vincentians and Killaloe Mercy were the five Congregations involved at that time.  Very quickly Kenneth Milne became involved on behalf of Church of Ireland Broadcasting Committee.

The early days were exciting, the Jesuits had just set up their Communications Office at 36 Lr. Leeson Street and 3R Productions was accommodated there.  I well remember the day I arrived in Leeson St. to start working part time for 3R Productions, Elaine Comerford of the Jesuit Communications Centre office, showed me how to turn on the computer, we were using Word Perfect 5.1 and the computer had 1 Gb of disc space!!  That evening I got a big fright when I suddenly thought ‘how do I turn this off?’, luckily Elaine was still there.

Step by step we contacted all the religious broadcasters on local and community radio stations and started to build up an extensive and continually growing list of people who did interviews with us over the next 30 years. We also contacted the Religious Congregations, and we are most grateful to all the Congregations and the Congregational Leaders who supported us over the years.   At that time, we used the Church of Ireland studio in Braemor Park for editing the interviews and while we recorded on Marantz tape recorders the final collection of interviews was edited on large quarter inch spools, and that was in the 1990’s!!  Later we set up our own studio in Leeson St.

In thirty years the radio syndication service moved from sending out the material on cassette tapes, to sending it on CDs and finally to uploading it to the Soul Waves Radio website, making it available to the public and supplying a broadcast version for local broadcasters.  Over that thirty years the service was initially known as 3R Productions – Religious Resources for Radio, and in efforts to get closer to its central aims it became Religious Network News RNN and finally Soul Waves Radio.  Over the years we had a continual stream of students from Kairos Maynooth doing interviews for us while they practised their skills and made connections.

Looking back now all of these patterns appear cyclical, tapes to CDs to website, changing of the name, the continuous stream of people who came to help and to contribute their energy and ideas, the continuous stream of interviewees who shared their wisdom and their insights with us.  In the early days interviews mainly covered the church year, scripture and difficult topics like suicide.  As time went on and society changed, the topics of the interviews changed also, covering climate change, justice issues and the place of women in society.

In recent years Soul Waves Radio Board struggled to find the way ahead and finally came to the conclusion that now was the time to stop.

‘The old order changeth yielding place to new
And God fulfills himself in many ways.
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

This is a time for Remembering, Recalling and Giving Thanks.

We are deeply grateful to all the people who were involved in any way with the work of the radio syndication service, we wish abundant blessings to all who continue to live their lives and we ask God’s blessing on those who have died.  We are also deeply grateful to Miriam Gormley who has been the Director for many years and to the members of the Board of Management who satisfactorily completed the task of closing Soul Waves Radio.

We look forward to noticing the next emergence of the desire to spread the Gospel.

Marie Stuart rsm
South Central Province