Paul Hopkins: End of the line for our iconic phone boxes

Worry was not an emotion a parent could control, my mother used to say to me. In my late teens when I was off with the lads for a night out – two pints and a rum 'n' black – my mother would say: "If you're running late, ring me and let me know where you are."

One Friday night having had our fill in McDaid's of Harry Street – in fine company with the poets Pearse Hutchinson, Peter Fallon and the wonderful Eilean Ni Chuilleanain (I the aspiring sonneteer in those days) – we missed the last bus home and began the long hike uphill to north county Dublin. As we crossed O'Connell Bridge, there were the two familiar phone boxes. I rummaged in my pocket for pennies and said to the lads: "I have to ring the Old Dear. I'll catch up with ye."

In those halcyon days – and well into the mid-90s – those cream and green boxes, dotted throughout the land, were our only means of communicating when out and about. And for those yet to have the black bakelite brick installed in their homes – a slow process in the late 60s – the box up the road was the only means of calling, in an emergency, the priest, the guards, the doctor, or the vet. A call that could make the difference between life and death. There was likely, too, nocturnal communications pertaining to illicit relationships conducted, albeit, in whispered tones.

Early in 2020 it was decided to dramatically reduce the number of 4,850 phone boxes, as usage had fallen by 80% in the previous five years. The kiosk, especially in rural areas, seemingly no longer provided a valuable link with the outside world. Now telecommunications company eir has just announced that it has begun removing the last of the country's payphone boxes. Of the 105 remaining units, 11 will become additional digital kiosks, while the other 94 will be removed in the coming months.

In recent years, disused phone boxes have been donated to community groups and repurposed as defibrillator sites, tourism kiosks and even religious shrines. Eir says 76 phone kiosks have been converted to rapid electric vehicle chargers, with an additional 66 on the way. Meanwhile, the converted digital kiosks will provide information for local authority services including mapping for visitors and locals.

It is almost 100 years since the first phone boxes appeared on Irish streets and as a tribute to the end of the payphone era, eir has refurbished a 100-year-old 'K1' kiosk – the first type of payphone box introduced in Ireland, on Dublin's Dawson Street.

"The public payphone was an important part of our lives for generations and it is fitting that to mark this, we have carefully refurbished one of the original phone boxes and we plan to donate it to a cultural institution where it can be preserved as an integral part of our national heritage," says eir CEO Oliver Loomes.

Although back then our only means of communication, the phone box was not without its distractions and, indeed, frustrations. Those big A and B buttons and the constant feed of pennies and then if the person called failed to answer, you pressed button B to get your pennies back and you wouldn't, despite constant effort. Damn technology you'd utter as you exited the Dr Who time-travelling what's-it.

That said, they had their plus side. By 'tapping out' the numbers on the top of the cradle (1,9 and 0 were free) one could get through to any number. My good friend Aoh was adept at this. And when decimal currency was introduced in 1971 it took a while to have the phones adapted. And the new decimal one penny coin was the same size as the old sixpence and worked very well.

On my smartphone the other day, my psychologist friend from Magherafelt asks: "What of their psychological significance rather than their utilitarian worth? What role did they play in the lives of people? What privacy did they afford, away from the home telephone for those lucky enough to have a telephone in the house but unfortunate enough to have no privacy using that instrument at home?"

Good questions but, at the end of the day, those iconic phone boxes will become but quaint memories of an older generation regaling their grandchildren with tales of trysts at the local telephone box or those romances conducted through whispered confidences in that semi-private box in the middle of the village or at the end of the road...