telephone

telephone exchanges opened in Dublin and Belfast in 1880, only four years after Bell's first transmission. Dublin–Belfast trunk routes were installed in 1884. The first submarine telephone cable, laid from Port Patrick in Scotland to Donaghadee, Co. Down, in 1893, cost £20,000. By 1900 there were 56 exchanges in Ireland. In 1912 the Post Office took over the service. Following partition, two separate systems emerged on the island. By 1930 only Co. Donegal and western Mayo remained unconnected. The first automatic exchange opened in Dublin in 1927, followed, in the north, by Groomsport, Co. Down, in 1929, and Belfast in 1935. During the Second World War, both networks were urgently upgraded for security reasons. In the Irish Free State, in 1945, 107 exchanges gave continuous service to 23,700 subscribers, with a further 732 exchanges on restricted‐hour service to 5,900 subscribers. The first transatlantic telephone cable was laid in 1956. In 1957–8, Subscriber Trunk Dialling began in Athlone and Cork. Belfast switched to STD in 1961. Dublin's first international telephone exchange opened in 1971. By 1977 there were 250,000 subscribers in Northern Ireland. In 1980 responsibility for the telephone service in Northern Ireland, as in the rest of the UK, was privatized and transferred to British Telecom. The following year, there was a similar transfer of the Republic's phone services to Telecom Éireann.

Peter Collins