Sir, – They are in every county in Ireland. We walk past them in the street every day. They are filthy, they’ve been bashed about, many are dangerous – not one has worked in nine years. Nobody is responsible and nobody cares.
They are the hundreds of Smart Telecom phone booths, now variously billboards, rubbish dumps, or lavatories – all are eyesores.
Contracts allowing the use of footpaths are not freely handed out, but Smart was permitted to walk away from its payphone concern in 2006. Subsequently taken over by Digiweb in 2009, no responsibility to make safe, or remove these structures appears to lie anywhere.
Perhaps there’s an expectation in government that the fad of mobile communications will pass and payphones will make a return.
In any event, these derelict structures are only symptomatic of the prevailing contempt held for the urban streetscape, from light-touch planning enforcement to no-touch refuse collection, especially in the capital.
The Department of Environment needs to give local authorities the green light and some incentive to go about the relatively straightforward matter of removing these wretched hulks from our communities and thoroughfares. – Yours, etc, PAUL McCARTHY Phibsborough, Dublin 7.