On a drive from Cork to Cavan recently, choosing to take the secondary roads through our villages and towns, I couldn’t help but notice what was no longer there.

Shutters closed like eyelids across the windows of small grocery shops that were once the mainstay of our villages; the faint outlines of familiar family names beneath the paintwork above doors that now open into homes or offices rather than the pubs they once were; and empty spaces where phone boxes once stood.

Time moves on. It must. Not everything can – or should – be preserved simply because generations of us remember it fondly. But our shops, pubs and phone boxes were more than places where we bought a loaf of bread, ordered a drink or made a call, and every time one disappears, something of the life it sustained disappears too.

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Which is perhaps why one of the unexpected pleasures of my journey was spotting old phone boxes enjoying new lives. Some are tiny libraries; others house defibrillators, local maps or community notices. Having spent almost a century connecting people by telephone, they are still connecting communities, albeit in entirely different ways.

First installed in Dawson Street, Dublin, in 1925, and numbering 3,000 throughout the country at the height of their popularity, these street-side sentinels have stood in stoic witness to the best and worst of our times.

The crackling, hissing line served as a magnet for the lovesick and homesick as they shared news of births, deaths and marriages, one corded conversation at a time.

I spent my adolescent years in a small village, and many of my memories revolve around the phone box. It sat beside the bus shelter, which also served as a waiting room for those biding their time until it was their turn to use the phone. The box was where we made plans with our friends, arranged our first dates, shared the post-date post-mortem and leafed through the torn pages of the tattered monolith that was the phone book in search of ‘that boy’s’ number’.

Business cards advertising taxis and other, less salubrious, night-time services clung to the graffitied walls. So too did the smell of cigarettes, clinging to your clothes and skin if you were in there for long and leading to tough questions when you got home.

At a time when visits home were as rare as your own landline, there were few things more precious than hearing the voice of someone you loved. Whether it was an emigrant child or a husband working away from home and calling from a different-coloured box in London, or maybe one even further afield, these long-distance calls were, quite literally, a lifeline.

As were those made from the hospital, at a time when soon-to-be mothers made sure their baby bags contained a purse full of coins, ready to call their nearest and dearest and announce their baby’s arrival to the world. A far cry from the video recorded in the labour ward that arrives now, often before the baby has even been weighed!

I spent my adolescent years in a small village, and many of my memories revolve around the phone box. It sat beside the bus shelter, which also served as a waiting room for those biding their time until it was their turn to use the phone. The box was where we made plans with our friends, arranged our first dates, shared the post-date post-mortem and leafed through the torn pages of the tattered monolith that was the phone book in search of ‘that boy’s’ number’

The last of Ireland’s public pay phones were taken out of service in 2024, just short of what would have been their centenary.

The surviving phone boxes have since been reclaimed by their communities, standing as reminders of the shared public world to which they once belonged, along with the village shop where the owner knew what we needed as soon as the bell above the door announced our arrival and the pub in which news was exchanged long before it appeared in the newspaper.

There is comfort in seeing these old boxes remain, adapted rather than abandoned. Their purpose has changed, but the promise behind them has not, here is something that belonged to everybody.

They may no longer carry the voices of the lovesick and homesick, but they remain places of connection, whether as little libraries and information hubs or, in the most urgent circumstances, the means to save a life.

The number may no longer be available, but the connection remains.