DEAR SIR:

Many weaknesses in services to the public were revealed by storm Ali. The fact that the Ploughing Championships was so badly disrupted just served to highlight the shortcomings. Met Éireann, with all of its mod-cons, got that one badly wrong but it followed a succession of quite inaccurate forecasts, particularly in relation to the north and west regions. Whatever the reasons, we can no longer rely on their forecasts for weekends.

Power lines were broken by falling trees. In our own case, it took Eirgrid a full 36 hours to restore our electricity. Forty years ago, each large town had an ESB office and they had repair squads ready to go out at short notice to find outages and to restore the supply. Eirgrid claims to have an overview of supplies from its Dublin office, yet they are much slower to respond than the ESB of old. Rural areas are usually the last to be reconnected. Eirgrid seems to be totally focused on transferring large amounts of electricity from the west to Dublin and they forget the needs of rural areas in between.

It appears that Eirgrid is not employing emergency crews in sufficient numbers. Its emphasis is on cutting costs and building ever-greater profits. Have they no care for the people with lung problems whose very lives depend on a steady oxygen supply, or for farmers with dairy herds who rely on milking machines? After a recent storm, I put these points to Eirgrid. The reply was that people should get and employ generators. Are they not the people charged with ensuring as steady a supply as possible? Was privatisation of the electricity service such a good idea?

Local radio was not much help either. On Wednesday morning, they carried the news about outages and the havoc caused but, in one case, they assured us all that services would be back to normal after four hours.

In general terms, storm Ali caused a major emergency for half this country. Various services went down too quickly and lives were put in danger, so there must be a national inquiry and solutions must be found.

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Power restored to 161,000 homes, but 25,000 still affected