Paddy Cullivan, a musician from Connemara, Co Galway, shares his experience living without power for six days after Storm Eowyn hit Ireland. He describes the challenges of daily life, the lack of communication, and the inadequate response to the crisis.
Performer PADDY CULLIVAN is one of the hundreds of thousands left without power following Storm Eowyn . Here, the Camembert Quartet band leader tells what life is like without electricity or network in the badly-hit area of Connemara , Co Galway, where residents are not sure when they will be re-connected. The house is frozen. I’m trying to get a generator. We have no power, internet, or phone network. We're cooking on a portable camp stove. Food is rotting in the fridge.
When will we be re-connected? My neighbour has been told she won’t get power back until February 5. She has no water. This is life in Furbough Co. Galway, on Day 6 without power since Storm Eowyn. Though only around 10km from Galway City, the contrast couldn’t be greater. The countryside feels like a return to the pre-industrial age. There’s no heat bar the wood burner in the kitchen. My elderly parents have never seen a total systemic breakdown like this in their lives. I’m writing this in a hotel as I wait for the coveted communal laundry station to become free, or Thunderdome, as I call it. Friday morning was terrifying. Lights and power went at 2.30am and from 3am the winds were so strong I thought the windows would blow in. My parents’ home sits on a height overlooking Galway Bay and the Atlantic. In the morning I surveyed the damage. A few slates were down and the bins and the Sky Dish had done the full Wizard of Oz. Damage-wise we got off lightly. I called on neighbours and we went cautiously down the street. Six towering Leylandii trees had fallen out onto the road, blocking it completely. Luckily the wind direction meant none had hit the houses they were precariously close to. Originally brought into Ireland as hedging, Leylandii are notorious for growing out of control into 100-foot ‘trees’, despite having roots only a few feet deep. In a once-in-a-generation weather event, they are incredibly dangerous, destroying electrical wiring and any other structure they come in contact with. As locals say:'they're a scourge'. In one of the few bright moments in this fiasco, it was amazing to see my neighbours out with chainsaws and forklifts, working together to clear it. By midday the road was clear. The shops were like bedlam, with empty shelves and so we were lucky we had food in. In the evening I went to the local hotel to charge phones, computer and battery packs. The entire network went at 7.30pm. No power was one thing – but now no communication? So if something happened to my parents or friends we couldn’t even text each other? When we could find one bar of coverage in nearby Barna, everyone was Facebook messaging each other the results of their personal Powercheck results. This was the website where you could enter your Eircode and see when power was expected to return. We were told last Saturday it would return Sunday. Now we're being told February 5. Two weeks to restore power? In a modern country that never fails to mention how good we have it and how rich we are? As emergency meetings were called, we were told everyone is ‘doing their best’, along with a lot of ‘shoulds’ and ‘wills’. Our government doesn’t plan – it reacts. The emergency workers aren’t doing their level best, but without real planning at a national level, we’ll always be unprepared. The massive windfarms 2km behind our homes were spinning away like billio, sending their electricity anywhere but the locality. Days without electricity is hard on anyone, but especially the old. My parents are freezing, depending on hot water bottles filled with water heated on the camping stove. The lack of foresight, planning, infrastructure and will to avoid a disaster like this is a stain on the body politic. But will every Leylandii tree be chopped down in the country? Will our bizarre overhead wiring be put underground? Should we ask Elon Musk to bring his Starlink satellite network to Ireland? Likely we’ll continue to make excuses for ourselves, saying this or that is too difficult to do. Or it will cost too much. 'Lessons will be learned.' Seeing how we vote, our leaders won’t learn any lessons themselves, I conclude, as I stare into another night of medieval candlelight and poor musical choices on a scratchy wind-up radio. Paddy Cullivan is a writer, musician and historical entertainer.
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