They have been part of our streetscapes for more than 80 years, but with dwindling usage, phone boxes are being phased out
JUST WHEN WE most need a hero, he’ll have nowhere to change into his cape and tights. Thanks to a decision by Eircom to remove more than 40 per cent of their phone boxes from all over the country come April, Superman and his ilk will have to find another fitting room.
Of the 4,850 phone boxes currently in operation, 2,151 are to be removed, with Eircom blaming “low, and in some cases no, customer usage over a sustained period”.
A two-hour phone box stake-out in Dublin this week confirmed this state of affairs. Though four public phone boxes were under scrutiny, only one person picked up a receiver over the course of a busy morning in the capital’s centre.
“My phone won’t pick up a signal,” explained an indignant Robert Slacke from Lucan, who had just forked out the €1 minimum to make a brief call to a friend he was meeting for lunch. “One euro. That shocked me.” It may seem a small price to pay when compared to the €1,000 a year that Eircom says is the average cost of maintaining a payphone, though this is not the reason being cited for the decision to remove so many.
“The primary reason for implementing this payphone removal programme is because there has been a huge drop in payphone usage,” says Eircom spokeswoman Dearbhaill Rossiter.
“Call volumes from payphones have fallen by more than 80 per cent in the last five years.”
The proliferation of mobile phones is being blamed for the decline and potential demise of the phone box, a 20th-century symbol of communication that has attained such cultural resonance that it has made its way into a Blondie song, a Hitchcock film and a Harry Potter book, and provided the main stage for Colin Farrell in Phone Booth.
Phone boxes have played in our collective consciousness as social hubs and lifelines to other worlds since they first graced our pavements in the early 1920s as standalone concrete structures with solid walls and wooden doors. Their look evolved as they sprouted on footpaths all over the country, so that by the telephone box heydays of the early 1990s, there were more than 8,500 in operation around the country. Yet since Eircom revealed its latest plans, it has become ever clearer that the days of the telephone box are numbered. Not everyone, however, is ready to let the box go without a fight.
“It’s a disgrace,” says Fine Gael spokesman for community and rural affairs, Michael Ring. “Eircom was set up by the tax payer of this country . . . and there is a social obligation to people who don’t have a landline or mobile. These phone boxes are there for them.”
Ring is particularly concerned about how the loss of telephone boxes will impact on rural areas where mobile coverage is not always reliable, citing examples from his own constituency of Mayo, which is set to lose 154 telephones.
When asked about the potential effects of the loss of five telephone boxes from the Mayo town of Kiltimagh, however, one local publican is unfazed. “I didn’t even think there were five phone boxes in Kiltimagh,” says James Doyle of the Shepherd and Flock, though he admits that some of the 1,000 odd locals still get use out of the telephone boxes that remain. “There’s a few that would be using them. Not everyone can work the mobile.” Yet Doyle is stoical about the loss of the town’s telephone boxes. “That’s the way it is in life, the man that has nothing is forgotten about,” he says. “If you don’t go with the times, you’re left behind.”
Those nostalgic for the telephone boxes of yore can always pop into another local watering hole, Teach O’Hora, where an old-style concrete Telecom box bought many years ago by proprietor Marty O’Hora retains pride of place in the bar. O’Hora, born and bred in Kiltimagh, has seen telephone boxes come and go. “It started with one in the middle of the town, not far from the post office,” he recalls. “Then they started putting in more of them . . . and eventually they became quite a big part of rural society. They were one of those things you saw when you walked down the street.” They weren’t always just for making telephone calls either. “They had several uses. Down through the years I saw fellows asleep in them.”
THOSE WHO OBJECT TO their disappearance can still have their say, however, as Eircom has pledged to put removal notification notices on all targeted payphones for a minimum of six weeks, with letters also being issued to local authorities to inform them of the planned telephone box removals. According to an Eircom statement: “Local residents and relevant authorities will be given an opportunity to submit their views in writing to Eircom before March 16th, 2009. All views received will be taken into account before a final decision is made on the removal of any payphone.”
The company also cited a survey of 1,000 people it undertook last year into payphone usage, where 81 per cent of respondents said they had not used a public payphone over the past year, and 48 per cent saying it was very unlikely they would use a public payphone over the following 12 months.
It appears that few will notice, or particularly care, as telephone boxes are phased out, at least until their mobile batteries die or they lose their mobile signal. Yet as our lone telephone box user Robert Slacke admits, when his own mobile failed him, finding a telephone box was suddenly a major priority. “It was a lifesaver,” says Slacke. Others, such as O’Hora, have a slightly more wistful take on the disappearance of the telephone boxes from a country that once embraced them as part of the future.
“It’s going to be part of the landscape lost to see them disappear.”