A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It was the Christmas Day phone call that brought it home; a simple WhatsApp call to the aunt spending the holidays with her son in Germany. There was a time when this sort of distance between us might as well have put her on a space mission to the moon – but these days, it’s quicker (and cheaper) than a local phone call.

Which shows again how far we’ve come in terms of communications technology; when in a lifetime we’ve gone from not necessarily having a phone in the house at all to giving one to ten-year-olds as part of their Christmas bundle.

Once upon a time, relatives had to make the journey to one of their number who had a landline so that they could ring sons and daughters in London or Boston on Christmas Day.

That triggered a logistical conundrum that would have stretched Honours Maths students for the Leaving Cert – how to ensure that ten people at one end all got to talk to ten people at the other end before Christmas Day itself was over.

And those were the fortunate ones. Others relied on phone boxes, writing home in advance to tell the folks what time they’d be standing in the kiosk to await that call from home.

Sometimes both parties were relying on a public phone which meant a lot of coinage to feed the slot and a lot of prayers that none of the neighbours was planning this cross-channel or transatlantic trick at the same time.

Tens of thousands of Irish immigrants made that arrangement to ring home from one phone kiosk to another, standing in a queue at the arranged time and hoping the incumbent would finish up and that the next in line wouldn’t be knocking at the window as you waited for contact with the other side.

If you lived in a house of flats with a public phone in the hall, you just hoped that your fellow flat dwellers were kind enough to run up the stairs to knock at your door to tell you there was a call for you.

More often than not, they couldn’t be bothered and just told home that there was no answer from your flat.

This was a time when the postal system was deemed sufficiently speedy for most of your requirements; a letter home outlining the cost of college books would solicit a reply a week later with a crispy note in it.

The phone calls were limited to times of desperation – and if you rang home, there would be alarm that suggested a crisis that couldn’t be dealt with by post.

So a call to the United States was an actual occasion – talking to people in the Land of the Free, a world you only really knew from the television.