7/26/2023 0 Comments Old phonebox![]() ![]() In the years since they’ve fallen out of use, many phoneboxes have fallen prey to vandalism and graffiti, and what might be euphemistically called antisocial behaviour. It’s not clear how the George’s Quay box is surviving, because lack of use isn’t the only issue with phoneboxes, of course. Hence the removal of 90% of the country’s phone boxes by December 2020, though a few of them hung on by their fingertips in Cork - that same year Eir reported that the Rebel County had the highest number of phone boxes remaining in the country, with 13, though as recently as last October four more phoneboxes in Patrick Street were removed. “Eir is permitted to remove a pay phone unit if the average usage over a period of six months falls below these thresholds. This was because their usage levels fell below the thresholds at which Eir was required to keep them working, the Irish Times reported: “At the end of 2015, there were some 900 public pay phones remaining in Ireland, but 621 were being used for less than a minute per day on average, with less than 30 seconds of this usage relating to freephone and emergency services calls. Ultimately that’s the raison d’être for these little cubicles and as far back as 2016 it was being reported that the majority of Ireland’s remaining public pay phones weren’t protected under Eir’s universal service obligations and were thus in line for the chop. ![]() The lads in Callanan’s were correct to ask about how much their local phone box is used. ![]() Picture: Denis Minihane.Īll of this is not even to touch on the vexed question of whether payphone is even the correct term, given the fact that we once relied so heavily on phone cards, which older readers will probably recall with a swift slap across their own foreheads.Īs an indication of how swiftly life evolves, this year is the 20th anniversary of the end of the phone card - use of those once-vital items declined seriously with the advent of the mobile phone, so production ceased in 2003.Ī brief mention here for the person known to this columnist whose entire family cherished one particular phone card - which celebrated Tina Turner, for some reason - that never seemed to run out and worked long after its ten units (units!) should have run out. (The truly interesting part of this memory is not that a vanload of engineers soon arrived to remedy the situation, but that so many people learned of the glitch and availed of it without the benefit of social media.) Further out the same road you could land in the Western Star pub, which featured an old-fashioned payphone of the Press Button A variety, though I never availed of this facility myself, as I had better things to be doing in the Western Star pub.Ī public telephone in Cobh, Co Cork. For a brief period in the late 80s there was one up on the Western Road which had some kind of glitch which allowed you to ring anywhere in the world for free: it was easily identifiable by the long queue outside, and your columnist enjoyed a lengthy though pointless conversation with a cousin in Massachusetts once he got to the head of the queue. (She did.) We also had payphone outliers. It would be interesting to see how today’s oversharers would deal with a communal phone: I distinctly remember an elderly lady tapping a person on the shoulder who was hogging a payphone in Merchant’s Quay and telling her to get off her call, and quick. This was a time when we had payphone etiquette. ![]()
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