Council set for legal action over phone kiosks

Clare County Council is set to proceed with legal action against telephone companies that have left phone kiosks in a "ruinous, derelict, and neglected" condition.

The authority has confirmed it will pursue the companies after they failed to respond to a request to remove or restore the eyesore kiosks in Ennis town centre.

The council has said it is now considering dealing with the matter under the provisions of the Derelict Sites Act.

Earlier this year, the local authority undertook a survey of all phone kiosks in the Ennis town area. While some kiosks have been abandoned and not used for many years, others have been disabled and rendered useless by vandalism.

“A total of 20 kiosks were identified and in some cases, the units are in ruinous, derelict, neglected condition,” a spokesman said.

“The council wrote to the operators involved in April 2014, asking that the equipment either be restored or removed and that the street then be restored to its original condition.

“It was pointed out that the units in High St and O’Connell Square were in a particularly poor state and that the presentation of kiosks in such a condition did nothing for the town retaining and improving on its status as Ireland’s Tidiest Large Urban Centre,” the council added.

Five months later, however, the authority has confirmed that the problem has not been addressed by the companies they contacted while there appears to be some confusion over the ownership of some kiosks.

The local authority is understood to have made contact with at least two operators however but has not been able to make contact with those responsible for kiosks operated by the former Smart Telecom.

A spokeswoman for BT Ireland confirmed that the company “sold its phonebox business to Smart Telecom some years ago”.

It is also known that Digiweb took Smart Telecom out of the examination process in December 2009 but that Smart Telecom’s payphone business was liquidated by that examiner.

A company spokesman has said, however, that the kiosks were “never the responsibility of Digiweb”.

Clare County Council has now stated: “The matter has not been resolved and Clare County Council is now looking at dealing with the issue under the provisions of the derelict sites legislation.”

In some counties, authorities have been trying to see abandoned phone kiosks restored and adapted to house defibrillators, but Ennis already has several of these located around the town.