Ireland's Telephone Service, 1980
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 มิ.ย. 2024
- Frustration at the long waiting times to get a home telephone and the poor availability of public pay phones.
Ireland’s telephone system is the most outdated in Europe. When can we expect to have the technology to improve our telecommunications?
In Carbury, just 33 miles from Dublin city centre, to make a phone call to anywhere, a connection must be made through the manual telephone exchange run by local postmistress Kathleen Broderick. These manual exchanges represent just five per cent of all exchanges in the country and it is expected that they will have been replaced within two years.
In Tallaght, conceived as a satellite town to Dublin with a projected population of around a hundred thousand, there is no hospital, public transport is bad, and communications are even worse.
One public telephone box located in Old Bawn serves the Ailesbury Estate with almost a thousand houses and at the moment it is out of order. Residents on the estate are frustrated by the waiting times to have a telephone installed in their houses with many having applied two years ago.
The nearest phone, actually it’s down in the pub.
Jim Higgins of the Ailesbury Estate Residence Association outlines the options or lack of options available if locals want to make a phone call. The options are the pub, the broken phone in the kiosk and the parish priest’s house.
‘Week In: Could You Hold A Minute Please?’ was broadcast on 25 February 1980. The presenter is Pat Kenny. - บันเทิง
I remember those days, having a landline telephone was a real privilege. The price of calls those days were really expensive, now you can call someone on the other side of the globe for nearly free.
you can VIDEO call someone on the other side of the globe for free. We could have ever imagined that. I wonder what another 40 years will bring.
@@JBrooksNYS
It’s almost scary, how fast technology has progressed and will progress in only a few decade’s
But Exciting to be alive as it’s happening too
@@JBrooksNYS So if you wanted to call someone (even in Ireland) then they charged you?
I'm American. Yes, if I wanted to call someone in Ireland from USS the price would be outrageous and charged by the minute. Even if I wanted to call someone in my own state, but a different area code, I would be charged by the minute as well. Im 38 and got my first cell phone at 18, even at that time it cost a lot of money to call someone outside the country.
@@DonnaChamberson Of course. The telephone in the kiosk would only work when you threw coins into it and the longer the distance was the quicker you had to put in more coins. When you had a telephone at home you would get a bill from the Post Office every month. When you didn't pay it, they would switch off your line.
And you put 65 pence in, in 5p coins. “Hello” “hello” press button A and all the money falls back out, and start all over again.
Amazing how much the tallaght accents have changed
Im american so I cant tell, but I was wondering about that. Because the American accent has also changed over the decades. But its strange that people who talked with a certain accent in 1980 are still here today, but they dont talk with that accent anymore.
Yes, isn't it?
Bad planning, public service isolationism, inner city tenements being unloaded onto people buying first-time homes on the commuter belt = generations being messed up by drugs and crime, and the Tallaght accent.
I remember making phonecalls to my folks abroad, you had to dial the operater, give them the number, tell them to reverse the charges.. if you phoned during lunchtime, I was often told to ring back after lunch 😅
The intro was so funky and edgy then Pat Kenny shows up.
with a face you'd like to slapped arse
😂
Ha Ha good one
Like a school principal “what is this devil music?”
he used to be a reporter,now hes just another propagandist.
My father passed away, died at home in Cork city, in Feb 1979. We didn't have a phone. Us children lived away from home. So my mom, who found him, had to go across the road to a neighbors, one of only several people with phones on our street of some 25+ homes, to call Emergency services. That is my strongest memory of how bad Phone Service in Ireland was throughout the '70s.
The telephone service in Ireland was simply awful at that time.
I can remember walking through Tallaght in 1978, trying to contact some people. It took me about 30 minutes to realise that there were basically NO private phones in the entire area. This was an urban area with a population equal to the city of Limerick, and the only telephones available to the public were either a few scattered and vandalised phone boxes, or in pubs.
We were so backward, so far behind the rest of western Europe, in that period....
There was a ten year waiting list to get a landline....
House sales would fall through because of the lack of a landline.
Nowadays who actually wants a landline?
@@gulfstream7235 I got one hooked up recently and find it's better than my cellphone.
The last manual telephone exchange finished up in 1987, in Australia the last one was in 1991
Watching this on the phone sitting on the bowl, how times have changed 😆
Half the people today wouldn't have a clue what this as about.
Yeah I don’t even know what a phone is
@@dylanhiggins4760 Like a 20 year old who never heard of a VCR, they are out there. I know what this is its and a phone box. I remember having to plan a long distance call it was more of an event that could take a whole evening, but by Jesus i wouldn't like to try an put that thing it in my shirt pocket.
Why would they? I am sure there is telephone and technology you are not familiar with that died out before you were born. Like the telegraph. Unless you are surprisingly old. I am in my mid forties so have seen the transition of some technology but there are things I am not familiar with.
Wasn't even that long ago. Nice to see young Pat Kenny
@@svordjdank4893 It is.
What most people didn't know was that the government had already taken a decision to invest in and modernise the telephone system at that time. Within a few years it was transformed to become one of the most modern in the world.
On a different note, there is a story of an American who was on holiday in Donegal. He phoned home to tell people about the fantastic telephone system. You picked up the phone, turned a handle and someone else made the connection for you.
Yes the taxpayer invested in it and then the governement employees in the the dept of posts and telegraphs were given a king's ransom in the form of shares in the new business when our new modern system was privatised, taxpayer ripped off again
@@winterishere9828 and the vultures picked over the carcass and sold it on a few times since. Bad idea to sell off the States infrastructure like that although if the waiting lists were that long it was easy to justify privatisation
The woman in our local post office exchange had all the gossip of the parish, when the phone operators were phased out in the mid 80’s see had nothing to talk about 😀😀😀
@@michaelwalsh9145 Yes. My wife had a friend in a village with an operator. It was more like an answering service. 'Oh dear, they have gone to Cork for the day, would you like to leave a message?'
@@michaelwalsh9145 We learnt about that in history
Your videos are sublime, thanks a lot for sharing!
Hard to believe how primitive telecomms were in Ireland at that time
...in Ireland. Thank God for multinationals and the German currency. Otherwise Ireland would still look like this. Now the country is full of middle class people who hadn't got a pot to piss in back in the day.
Yea phones where invented 100 year before this but it was still considered a luxury in Ireland.
@@anthonymullen6300 Yes because before the Euro,Amazon,Facebook and Google I used to send a carrier Pigeon to my friends to let them know I would be out
@@anthonymullen6300 plenty today don’t have a pot to piss in either
@@michaelwalsh9145 But they act like they're god's gift to the planet
They used to listen in to the calls
I remember on our road in Dublin our house was one of 2 houses (out of twenty) that had a phone. There was a 5yt waiting list! We got into a local TD and said it was needed for my mother to check up on her father in Mayo (actually lived in Dublin lol). Ridiculous
That is the way we run our health services now !
A manual telephone switch and operator in 1980, I heard it was difficult to get a house phone but I didn't it was like this in the 80s.
These videos are fascinating!
The 40's in the 80's. Thank you, WWW.
The good old days weren’t really all that good I guess.
@John Neilson
The 'Good Old Days' in Ireland were basically bloody awful.
Especially if you were female.
We were dog poor, we were backward and isolated, and we were losing our people to massive emigration.
We came very close to being a failed state.
@@gloin10 from all I’ve heard from Irish friends of different ages, things had been awful.
Here in the US. the Right Wing want to go back yo the “good old days” when it might have been good, but only if you were white, male, Christian, straight and moneyed.
@@johnnielson7676
Indeed.
It's noticeable that the only people in Ireland who pine about the 'Good Old Days' are older males who had secure jobs in the Civil Service, teaching or the banks.
Mind you, there are precious few of them....
I have never met a single Irish woman who wanted to go back to those wonderful times when a female could not sign a contract, or open a bank account, without a second signature from her husband, father or other male relative/sponsor...
As for contraception, abortion or divorce....
@@gloin10 an older friend from Westmeath passed away at 93. She grew up dirt poor, and at age 16 she was to be married to a wealthy farmer 35 years her senior, her father didn’t give her a choice. Her mother and aunt secretly gave her all their meager savings, so she snuck away at night and went to join relatives in NY. She had taken a few trips back to Ireland, she loved Irish culture and music (was at every Ceili and session) but was always honest to us about the way women were treated. She had a love/hate relationship with Ireland. She outlived two husbands and a younger boyfriend!
@@johnnielson7676
Apart from voting rights, we were basically feudal when it came to European standards about women's rights.
Just another reason why our EEC/EC/U membership was SO IMPORTANT.
We were forced to grow up.
Got to hand it to Pat. Still smashing it 40 years later 💪
When we were living in Ireland, up to 1980, "are you on the phone" was a question one asked with a soft expectation that they would answer "yes" but not with any certainty and not with any surprise or shock at an answer of "no."
That in Galway city.
All these youngsters going on about how critical a phone is, "what if a child gets sick" probably got sick any number of times when they were children and not a phone in sight. It speaks more of their capabilities than it does of the ongoing thousands of years without phones.
Kind of like today's "Are you on Facebook?"
@@JBrooksNYS Rather on Whatsapp or Telegram or any of these. Facebook is now for old people.
I think they mean _seriously sick_ like as in, *needing* an ambulance! Not just childlike sick.
@Peter Gruhn You mean thousands of years without phones or medical facilities when infant mortality was around 50%?
Before you start hankering for the 'good ol' days, you might want to find out about what life was actually like...
Pat Kenny using a more refined English accent!
10 pence a call.. 3 minutes ya got
Then if ya knew how y’all tap the number ya wanted and got your call free o the good old days 👌
In 1980 it was still 4p for a3 minute local call.
@@seamusburke9101 I must’ve been ringing long distance IE Dublin
Fuck me...the denizens of Tallaght sounded half posh back then compared to the howaya knackers that populates the kip now...!!
That intro hit HARD, way edgier than anything you'd hear on a show intro today. Is it an actual song?
Yes it’s a song, it’s called Roll it back, by the Fourskins
@@bid84 I can't find it anywhere!
Bought a new house in Cobh Co. Cork in 1980 only to find all the phone lines were allocated and there was no plans to install any new ones. It was 1984 when they installed some new ones and thats when the waiting list started. Best thing I ever did was to get out of there
☘️ It's hard to believe how *backward* things were then, it's still pretty recent. When I tell teens today what it was like they have *no comprehension* what it was like. We had a phone at home as my Dad needed it for work & we'd have all the neighbours using it all the time - with family ringing from UK & everywhere. *It's hard to believe it's only a few decades ago* !
@@stellamaris5405 did yis charge the neighbors?
@@pmacc3557 ☘️ Not officially, but I done well extorting pocket money & cigarettes from said neighbours.. 😉
@@stellamaris5405 well im hoping you declare these items for taxation and keep the thing in order
@@pmacc3557 ☘️ Certainly, as with the usual tax avoidance strategies that are expected from every honest, law-abiding citizen.. ☘️ 🕊️😌
You don't see these anymore on Irish streets 15 years ago there were still plenty of them around although they had already fallen into disuse for several years by then but most of them have since been removed entirely children today really have no idea what a public phone was.
I don't know about the rest of the country but in the last year a bunch of new public phone boxes were installed here in Galway. Never used one but I think you can use your card or phone to tap/pay for calls.
@@GodOfVictory501 yeah it’s weird
Some towns and villages still have phone boxes but they now contain defibrillators
And they smashed up the one telephone they had
Happened everywhere, it wasnt a sign that the area was crime ridden, just seems some people had a peverse pleasure in destroying them.
Great video
The plank when he was a 2×1
Pat Kenny then pulls out an iPhone 8 and states that residents have been reduced to using this
I was kind of shocked that the phone service overseas was different then in America when I was a sailor in the 80s. I never went to my grandparents motherland, Ireland though. Seems like the rest of the world in the 80s that I visited.
Next week the main report is about the horse and cart.. “Does it have a future”?
I didn’t expect to see Freddie Mercury. What a thrill! 😎
Lionel richie
Liviiiiiing on my phone
Holy moley ! Pat Kenny as a youngfla! 🤣🤣🤣
To paraphrase John Waters, bring back the bad phones!
THAT'S a telephone kiosk? Where I grew up, it was called a public toilet......
Gotcha , so it was you !
It was called a firework factory in certain areas.
Awesome, amazing this is still going on. Thank you.
No, this was in 1980 lol.
@@samaraisnt Damn, thank you.
And the people in country areas listening in to the conversation 🙂
Have they still not uploaded the video where RTE constructed the robot Pat Kenny?
I hope the cops still have an open file on the damage to the phone in the telephone box . If they have I would be worried if I was Pat Kenny
His haircut
You'd think it was the 1850s, yet this was 1980
clondalkin and tallaght where a complete mess, no shops, no schools, no street lights, no road markings, no street name signs, no phones, and the only place for kids to play was a building site, how many more kids where not killed i'll never know, my grand father passed away in 1980 a year after we moved to clondalkin, it took the garda 10 hours to find our house, there wasn't even maps, they got away with murder back then, how lucky many families where not to have a fire because there was zero way to ring the fire brigade. i'm gonna guess many a person passed away because they didn't get an ambulance in time. it took protests and blocking roads in ballyfermot and clondalkin villiage before the council did anything about it, imagine building all these houses and not having public transport, street lighting, shops, schools, playgrounds, there was nothing, just here's a house on a building site, good luck! different times for sure. lol i remember my father chasing cows out of the back garden on our second day in the place and my little brother asked with a worried face da,, are we culchies now? (clondalkin was country side to us) and me da said without blinking an eye, nah i think we're feckin builders hahahahahaha
this was fkin insanity....these poor people
now people can't stop looking at their phones...it's the opposite ..and it's another form of hell
I grew up in Co. Sligo in the 80's. We never had a phone. There was a Telefone box up the top of the street where me and my friends would phone up taxis and then stone them when they arrived. Great craic!!
Typical Irish.
Classic Barnet on Pat.
The presenter is very good, whatever happened him?
And now we have high speed internet in the palm of our hands.....would the people of 42 years ago believe it??
"the only phone box is at the pub down the road, and me husband needs the phone for work, so me husband is always going down to the pub all day every day I don't see him from 8am to 9pm every day he's always waiting on the phone."
It was amazing when my house finally got a phone in the early 1990's.
What was the theme music on this?
At @3:20 are those Irish voices or English / French voices?
Very interesting watching this as here in Britain back in the seventies and early eighties the phone system here was just as crap. Not as bad as Ireland, but still crap, as British Telecom has a monopoly on phone provision. Margaret Thatcher changed that in 1982 by announcing she would privatise BT which happened in 1984.
also in ireland telecom eireann was established in 84, ending the dept post and telegraphs service
Pat the puppet of the Elites . Great video , love your channel. 👍
Based on this that seems like a good news show. Feel bad for those folks.
I love the videos of lreland 🇮🇪☘️☘️☘️🌈
What a great excuse to visit the pub. Could this be the greatest clue to the vandalised pay phone? “Sorry it took so long to make that call, the queue down the nags head was terrible (hic)😉
my parents used a messenger pigeon before 1980 to reach out to the world
My family relied on smoke signals.
Both of you are very posh and showing off.
0:48 - What happens if someone wants to make a telephone call late at night, in the small hours, or during the weekend? Surely this woman was not on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year?
It's mad Ted!
Today people would say, "What is a telephone?"
Sorry I'm not familiar with that term.
@@philipmcdonagh1094 We still have one, but we're old and it's exciting when it rings lol.
Tele-phone. Is that a phone with RTE on it!
The Local Pub. The hub of the Irish community 🤣
1:46 Tallaght 😂 give em a shopping centre that’ll help
Telephone service in Ireland. 1980 bad year for Britain economically and politically. Awesome. Excellent video. God bless Donegal Ireland 🇮🇪.
What has telephone service in Ireland got to do with Britain in 1980?
@@murpho999 ☘️ ..was wondering that myself! 🙄
@@murpho999 he’s from Donegal , enough said
Britain is 450 kilometres across a big wavey thing called the Irish Sea....
@@nanor9671 Did ever live Britain in 1980. Did ever live Northern Ireland 🇮🇪. Being Irish do understand politically the blood price Michael Collins Sinn fein Irish Prime minister paid win the Free Eire or independent Ireland from Britain politically in 1922 Anglo Irish Treaty. I take 1980 Ireland and 1980 Britain over 2022 Britain. Rural Donegal Ireland Catholic Irish Conservative we vote Sinn fein. It shock if won Ireland politically Thomas. The Ireland Irish government in Dublin Irish Parliament has FF and FG and Irish greens Irish government killed Rural Ireland bare County Donegal. We keep Donegal Ireland politically Thomas.
Pat badly needed a haircut back then.
He had a "lockdown" hair style around 40 years before lockdowns started.
3.18 Lionel Richie..hello is it me your looking for
Better times
A wooden telephone "kiosk" (booth) ..
Didn't ye ever learn how to tap a phone?(in the old sense ) All calls national and international for free!A great money saver!
How come no one has a Tallaght accent?
Please explain to this British man here what a "Tallaght" accent is and what/where is Tallaght?
@@johnking5174 Tallaght is a big suburb in Dublin. The accent tends to be a working class accent.
@@johnking5174 you can listen to it on a video: Senator Lynn Ruane - speech from 21 Apr 2022 on VideoParliament Ireland channel on youtube
A lot of country voices in tallagh back then. Ah yes the pub best place to go 😊. And the father 😅
I never knew Lionel Richie lived in Dublin 3:17
Thank god I was born in 84
2:34 Gavin McCormack's mum Kathleen on 2 PINEVIEW AVENUE DUBLIN 24 D24 A33Y
Public telephone boxes in Britain is none excistant! ...Controlled thing if you ask me ....
You guys don't have phones.
Ang the Irish gen z is basically trashing this country
Could they not just use WhatsApp?
What a wolly
It was like a 3rd world country back then.
Fuck why was Ireland so backward then?
It was a poor country. Ireland back then had severe unemployment and money was scarce. Ireland went through a little boom until Sean Lemass 1959-1966, but come the early 70s, the world recession hit Ireland badly, and Ireland remained the poor man of Europe until really the late 80s, when Charles Haughey changed the attitude of the Irish, making it more about money making (hint hint Haughey loved money).
@@johnking5174 the people had a pretty socialist attitude as well back then and were big on unions I think. That's never particularly helpful.
This technology played havoc with my love life until Mobil phone's came along. The money I spent wooing and cooing my girlfriend on public phone's. The things you do for love. Like waking in the rain and the snow and there's nowere to go. 📞 X 👩❤️💋👨📱📲
Heathen not even wearing a mask