Michael Moynihan: Dialling back into pre-mobile era when the phonebox ruled the streets

“Any chance they’d take away this yoke? I’d love to see the stats on its usage or is it even functioning? Some interesting stickers on it though.”

Ah, the great days of the payphone. And the great days of finding a payphone. One that worked. Which didn’t retain a particular smell from a recent visitor, a more difficult task than you might imagine on a wet Saturday night, and practically impossible on a Sunday morning.

This was a time when we had payphone etiquette. 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. (She did.) We also had payphone outliers. 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.

(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.

All 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.

As 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.

A 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. Hence its nickname, Magic Tina.

The lads in Callanan’s were correct to ask about how much their local phone box is used. 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.

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.

“Eir is permitted to remove a pay phone unit if the average usage over a period of six months falls below these thresholds ....”

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.

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. 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. When Kingsley Amis wrote his celebrated description of a hangover (“His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum”) he might have been thinking of many a defiled phonebox, though with the complications resulting from use by a larger creature of the etc, etc.

The decline of the phonebox is regrettable for aesthetic reasons, as it’s classic street furniture — not the glass cabinet to be seen on George’s Quay, true, but the originals, the solid cream and green phoneboxes, the first of which was erected on Dawson Street in 1925.

It took a long time to get the name above the door correct, mind. It was only two years ago Eir decided to get rid of the old ‘telefón’ and replace it with the more correct ‘teileafón’ at the behest of Foras na Gaeilge.

(Loath though I am to contradict Foras na Gaeilge, is teileafón itself not an example of what Mr Hurley in the North Mon used to call a seacláid-y word? What happened to the reliable guthán?) 

Fair dues to the communities repurposing those phoneboxes, some of which are here in Cork. 

If you tipped down to Clonakilty a couple of summers ago you could enjoy a phone box library in Kent Street, while in many parts of the country the old phonebox now houses a defibrillator.

Plans are underway to use some as rapid electric vehicle charging units as well. Eir recently reached agreements with eight county councils to install 80 EV chargers nationally though I note the list — Offaly, Mayo, Cavan, Waterford, Kilkenny, Tipperary and Monaghan — does not include Cork.

In addition, there appears to be ongoing plans to replace some phone boxes with new “digital pedestal” kiosks that provide touch-sensitive screens and advertising space. Last month we learned over 20 of these digital pedestal kiosks were to be installed across Dublin — not Cork, I note again — and Eir has said these modern kiosks will preserve public telephone access while adding additional functionality.

Well, hopefully the forlorn outpost on George’s Quay will survive this latest cull. It’s dodged the axe so far but its days may be numbered unless we can find a new use for it.

We could take a leaf from the American company which, a few years back, announced a new line of public toilets designed to look like red British phoneboxes on the outside — the tele-toilette (seriously).

I have the company number to hand if anyone wants to call. If it were 35 years ago we could go up to the Western Road and ring from the phonebox there. For free.