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AS MANY AS 9,000 hours of RTÉ News broadcasts are being released to the public after they were recovered from perishing tapes.
The recordings cover from 1985 to 1999, and events such as the divorce referendum, the Omagh bombing, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
During this period RTÉ camera crews recorded on Beta SP, a videotape format made by the same manufacturer as Betamax. Archivists at the state broadcaster say these are ‘vulnerable to decay’, and needed to be digitalised.
The mammoth undertaking, which RTÉ undertook in association with the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, involved processing 13,332 tapes. Before they could be recovered, they first had to be sent to Amsterdam to be baked in a specially-designed ovens to improve the audio and visual quality.
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Currently just 1985 is available on the RTÉ Archives website, with the rest up until the turn of the millennium being uploaded each day.
You’ll recognise a few familiar faces in the recordings, from Des Cahill trying out Aer Lingus’s new transatlantic service…
The broadcast recordings and materials managed and preserved by RTÉ Archives are a distinct part of our collective cultural memory, offering unique insights into the unfolding Irish State from 1926, when Radio Éireann was founded, right up to the present day.
However, over a quarter of a century after its introduction, the video tape format, which replaced film, is now in peril and must be reformatted to be preserved. Without this intervention valuable content is at risk of being lost to future generations.
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Mains pipes in Limerick must be in a bad way. I work on the Ballysimon Road in Limerick and the amount of times the mains pipe on this road has burst is nuts.
Dont worry this time next year when their all transfered to Irish Water they will be too busy fixing water meters to have time to fix leaks, then you’ll be giving out.
That is a stock photo. Howeveer it could also be a photo of typical water pipes anywhere in the country. Some water pipes have been repaired so often the councils would have paid 10 times less to actually replace them altogether.
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