Ireland is hanging up on the public telephone box with almost half of all kiosks around the country to be cut off in the coming months, it emerged today.
The once familiar and iconic site of the illuminated payphone in every village, town and city looks set to be the stuff of nostalgia as the mobile phone tightens its grip on our talk time.
Eircom said it will disconnect and remove 2,151 of the remaining 4,850 public payphones dotted around the country’s highways and byways, starting in April.
In the early 1990s, there were more than 8,500 public payphones across the Republic.
Michael Ring, Fine Gael’s Community and Rural Affairs spokesman, denounced the move as an attack on the poor and people who live in the Irish countryside.
“They have taken away the railways, the post offices and this is another attack on rural Ireland and an attack on the most needy in society, who can’t afford mobile phones,” he said.
But Dearbhaill Rossiter, Eircom spokeswoman, insisted usage of payphones had plummeted by more than 80% over the past five years, simply making many no longer financially viable.
“Payphone usage has declined dramatically in the last few years and the fact of the matter is that in today’s environment there is no longer as much of a need for them,” she said.
“We are not removing every payphone in Ireland but in the case of these particular payphones there is little and in some cases no usage.
“It is actually costing us money to retain them.”
Mr Ring argues that there was a social context to public payphones and they should not be looked at only in terms of financial returns.
“These payphones might be the only contact an old man in a rural area has with a doctor or a hospital, if they don’t have a mobile or a landline,” he said.
“It’s all about the social contact as well, they could be cut away from the outside world.”
He called on Eircom to make clear its long-term plans for the provision of public payphones.
“What they are really at is getting rid of them altogether,” he said.
“They have done enough rationalisation now, they are almost down to a quarter of what they were in the 1990s. Surely to God, there must be a need for those that are left."
The phone company has begun pasting notices to the thousands of payphones that it intends to remove from service as part of a public consultation process.
Letters have also been sent to the local councils in the areas affected by what Eircom is calling a “rationalisation programme”.
Residents and political leaders are being given the opportunity to make submissions by March 16th.
“All views received will be taken into account before a final decision is made on the removal of any payphone,” said Ms Rossiter.
In a survey carried out by Eircom last year, eight out of every ten people said they had not used a public payphone during the previous year, with almost a fifth saying they had.
The most common reasons for using a public payphone was because the caller had no credit on their mobile phone, their mobile phone battery was dead or they had forgotten or lost their mobile phone.
Almost half of the 1,000 people polled said it was very unlikely that they would use a phone box over the coming 12 months, according to Eircom.
A phonebox in Dublin’s Dawson Street, which still stands, is believed to be the first erected in Ireland, 84 years ago.
PA