For a small community in Connemara, living in a mountainous valley of breathtaking beauty also means living in a blackspot for mobile phone coverage.
Townlands such as Shanafaraghaun and Finny outside Clonbur, which are surrounded by the Maumturk and Partry mountains, have little or no signal.
“We’re in the mountains here,” explains Joe Joyce (56), a hill sheep farmer in Shanafaraghaun. “There is a mast in Clonbur 10 miles away but once you go over the mountain you lose the coverage.”
“It’s not good enough in 2022, we’ve been fighting for it for 15 years. Up the mountain, 150 metres from my house, I can get four bars of 4G, but you cannot use your mobile phone to make a standard call inside the house.”
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Others have to drive to lay-bys on the roads to pick up mobile phone signals, according to basket maker Joe Hogan, who lives nearby in Finny.
“When you know that someone is going to send you a message, essentially you have to drive somewhere to get the message.
“If you see people parked in unlikely places, that’s what they’re at, they’re stopped at a spot that is known to have coverage,” he says. “I wouldn’t trade living here for mobile phone reception, but it is a pity more isn’t being done to provide better coverage.”
Galway County Council carried out a mobile signal survey on behalf of the Department of Rural and Community Development in 2018.
“This survey was used for engagement with the telecoms industry to try to help highlight and hopefully in the long term help resolve poor coverage in areas,” a council spokeswoman said.
According to two of Ireland’s biggest mobile network operators, Three and Eir, the coverage deficit is caused by the mountainous terrain blocking the signal.
“Our nearest site is completely blocked by the mountains and therefore limits service in the area,” a spokeswoman for Three said.
A spokeswoman for Eir added: “Mobile service is limited in this area due to the mountainous terrain and the rural nature of the area.”
Joyce, who gives sheepdog demonstration tours on his farm, says tourists cannot communicate last minute cancellations, delays, or queries about directions to him when he has no phone signal. Some high profile tourists have arrived with bodyguards, for whom lack of coverage can be a concern, he adds.
“All I want is to get an engineer or someone into the house to say, well you can get a deflector or something here. As soon as you start going up the mountain you get coverage, so there are pockets and it’s not like you’d have to put up a new mast I’m sure,” he says. “My wife is with Vodafone but she cannot get a signal inside the house.”
A Vodafone spokesman said it has network coverage in the area and there are no reported network issues or outages.
Some 99 per cent of Ireland’s populated areas had 4G coverage last year, according to the European Commission’s Digital Economy and Society Index report.
ComReg’s national outdoor coverage map allows phone users to establish the level of coverage where they work or live and helps them choose the network provider that best meets their needs.
A ComReg spokesman said it will continue to engage with the Government’s mobile phone and broadband taskforce “over the coming period”, to identify solutions to the broadband or phone coverage deficit, and investigate how to provide better services for consumers.
For Hogan and Joyce, a lack of mobile phone signal can be problematic for online transactions too when they cannot receive texts for verification purposes.
Hogan explains: “There’s a spot 150 yards from here — you don’t need a huge amount of reception for a text for verification purposes — but by the time you go there to get the text and then get back to the house to confirm, your chance is gone.
“You make allowances. I feel I’m okay because people for the most part know not to contact me by mobile phone, I use email and landline, so it’s not affecting me as much. It might also be an age profile, the younger a person is the more likely they are to want it.”
Joyce says phone coverage is crucial for hillwalking. When he fell off his quad bike in a coverage blackspot some time ago, he was lucky to escape with minor injuries.
“I was lucky that I only had my face smashed. I was up on a mountainous area, where there was no one, and if I happened to get knocked out or break a leg I was finished.
“It would mean an awful lot to the area. There are no young people staying in the area or building in the area. There are no children under the age of nine here, and no people between the ages of 15 and maybe the mid-30s, and when you don’t have services for young people, they will leave the area.”
Meanwhile, outside Kiltealy in Co Wexford, in the foothills of the Blackstairs mountains, John Murphy runs Mohurry Mills general merchants and does not have mobile phone coverage inside his shop. To make or receive calls, he has to walk outside.
“If you phoned me on my mobile, I might or might not get the call in the shop but if I go outside the door I have it,” he says. “The coverage in this area is not good. If you drive from Kiltealy to Bunclody, for half of that road you will not have a Vodafone signal.
“That’s the problem we have. I don’t know what the answer is, you can just hope that in a year or so they’ll improve it.”
Deirdre Banville, who lives in Kiltealy village, says coverage has improved for her in the past few months.
“It was like Christmas Day. All of a sudden, you had coverage, I’m with Vodafone. Before that, we were a dead zone, you’d have to go upstairs in the house and maybe then you’d get only one or two bars. The coverage was nearly non-existent and it was ironic because we have the mast close to us on Mount Leinster.
“It was difficult to get things done. But it’s great now, you can walk around the whole place and get coverage.”
A spokesman for the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications says it has received parliamentary questions in relation to mobile phone coverage in recent months, but not in relation to Shanafaraghaun or Kiltealy.
He said a new work programme of the Mobile Phone and Broadband Taskforce is being finalised, for implementation over coming weeks.
“The new work programme of the taskforce intends to harness and improve upon the positive spirit of engagement and robust collaborative structures of the taskforce, to build on the solid progress made since 2016 in addressing deficits in mobile and broadband telecommunications.”
