Eircom to remove 153 Mayo phoneboxes

Eircom to remove 153 under-used Mayo phoneboxes


Anna-Marie Flynn and Neill O’Neill

EIRCOM has confirmed that it is set to remove over 150 public telephone boxes in Mayo. Just six months after it emerged that the county was home to Ireland’s four loneliest telephone boxes – booths that just saw one call made in the previous 12 months – Eircom has said it will disconnect and remove 153 payphones here.
The ‘rationalisation programme’, which proposes a cull of 2,151 of the remaining 4,850 public payphones throughout the country, will begin in April.
However, local authorities and people can make submissions in writing to their regional Eircom office on or before March 16 next in an attempt to save any targeted phone box from extinction. Removal notification notices will soon be placed on all targeted payphones for a minimum of six weeks, and letters have already been sent to local councils informing them of the rationalisation programme in their area.
The Westport Town area will potentially lose six phone boxes in the move – in Murrisk, Lecanvey, Castlebar Street (two), on the Quay Road and Mill Street – while phone boxes on Clare Island, Inishturk and Main Street and the Mulranny Road in Newport are also scheduled for removal.
The Claremorris area will have 25 phoneboxes removed, which along with Ballina is the most in any one area in Mayo, while 18 will be removed from the Belmullet region, including  eight from the parish of Achill.
In light of the announcement, Mayo TD, Michael Ring, Fine Gael’s Community and Rural Affairs spokesman, took aim at Eircom and said the company’s intention is another dissolution of services for the poor and people who live in rural Ireland. Calling on the communications company to make its long-term plans for the provision of payphones known, he said: “The railways, the post offices and the courts have all gone, and this is another attack on rural Ireland and an attack on the most needy in society, who can’t afford mobile phones.”
“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. It’s all about the social contact as well, they could be cut-off from the outside world,” he added.
The disconnection will mark a stark change along the highways and byways of rural and urban Ireland, when compared to the early 1990s when there were more than 8,000 payphones nationwide.
A spokesperson for Eircom said the humble phonebox is ‘no longer financially viable’ after the use of booths nationwide fell by 80 per cent in the last few years.
“The fact of the matter is that in today’s environment there is no longer as much of a need for them. 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,” said the spokesperson.
Last July, market research carried out by the company found that eight out of every ten people said they had not used a public payphone during the previous year, with many citing having no mobile phone credit or battery among the reasons for using public phones.
A total of 17 boxes in Ireland had made just one telephone call for the duration of the previous year, four of which were in Mayo. The four ‘lonely boxes’ were at Westport House Country Estate, High Street, Ballinrobe, Garden Street, Ballina and Shraheens in Balla.

Submissions on the removal of phoneboxes can be sent to John Hargadon, Regional Payphone Manager, Eircom HQ, Rathedmond, Sligo Town, Co Sligo.