Losing Irish Payphones

THE PAY PHONE will be largely absent from the outdoors Irish landscape as a nationwide programme of removing underused fixtures gets traction. Small notices have been placed on the glass of dozens of payphones near where I live and work, including 85 in Limerick. Local residents have up to 16 March 2009 to loadge objections but they have to make a strong case for retention. Eircom recently interviewed more than 1000 people and discovered that four out of fie people had not used a public phone in more than a year. In my social circle, the only people using pay phones have run out of credit on their mobile phones. Either that, or their batteries were flat. It's not hard to find pay phones used as public urinals in Ireland. They're also subjected to exceptional vandalism, involving fires and smashed glass. When I first came to Ireland (before the Celtic Tiger was a cub), there were 8,500 public phones in the country. My first three phone calls were from Irish pay phones to international numbers.

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