Card-phone rings up some resistance
May 1992
‘A lot of people would have 20p in their pocket before they’d have £2,’ said Mrs. Mary Murphy of O’Connor’s Post Office in Ballymurn as she mused over Telecom Eireann’s decision to put an ultra-modern card-phone in the village.
As and from Monday, 4th of May, tele-communications in Ballymurn changed dramatically. Gone was the ever-faithful (yet slightly antiquated) pay phone, while Telecom technicians erected a new coinless card-phone.
Planted outside of Prendergast’s shop, physically the phone didn’t look much different from its ‘outdated’ predecessor, apart from a nice tinted Perspex shell.
Only when the people of Ballymurn got into the phone booth did they realise that a coin slot was missing and that a 10 unit card (which incidentally costs £2) was needed before a three-minute local call could be made.
Granted, these cards are readily available in either Prendergast’s shop, which closes at 11.30 p.m., or in the Post Office. However the new-fangled phone still caused some annoyance in the district. ‘One man got the shock of his life. He thought that it was going to cost him £2 every time he wanted to make a call. He didn’t realise that he could use the card again,’ laughed Mary.
While Mary notes that people in the area are now buying cards, she still feels that the old payphone was just as practical. ‘We used to empty the phone for Telecom regularly, and in the whole time it was there, money was only stolen from it once,’ she said.
She also thought that people might be stuck in an emergency and might not have the money to buy a call card. ‘They mightn’t have £2 at the time, even if the shop is open. While you might only need 20p to make a call, you have to pay for 10 phone calls in advance,’ she said.
While in Wexford town, Mary had also seen that card-phones and pay-phones were being erected back-to-back. However, Telecom had only granted them a single, solitary, card-phone. ‘I thought it was a bit discriminatory that the town areas have card-phones and pay-phones, while people in rural areas only have one option,’ she said.
With a population of over 400 people in Ballymurn, other villagers felt that a pay-phone should also have been installed. ‘The nearest pay-phone to us is in Oylegate,’ said one native, ‘and that’s over three miles away’.
Telecom’s reasoning behind placing a cardphone in Ballymurn was explained by spokesperson Patricia Daly in Waterford. ‘The old phone had to be replaced,’ she said. ‘It would have become obsolete in June.’
She noted that it was becoming a policy by Telecom to replaced old coin phone boxes with new up-to-the-minute card-phones and by the end of the year they hope to have 20% more card-phones in the country than pay-phones.
‘In places like Wexford town, you will see cash phones and card-phones together. In rural areas, because the revenue from the phones is quite low, there can only be one phone and the card-phone is the type we are going with,’ she said.
In relation to the cost of the cards, she suggested that a £2 call was much handier, particularly if people are ringing long distance. ‘I accept that it would possibly be better to have a pay-phone if you have to make an isolated call. But, people in rural areas would make calls more regularly and a card is handier than having to look for change all the time,’ she reasoned.
She also said that there had been a high incidence of vandalism to cash phones in the past. ‘There is no money involved with the cardphones, so we can cut down on the amount of vandalism,’ she said.
When told that the Ballymurn pay-phone had only been vandalised on one occasion and that it was regularly emptied by Post Office staff, Patricia was still adamant that the card-phone was there to stay. As she says herself: ‘It’s all part of Telecom’s replacement policy.’ And that’s that.