It is becoming ever clearer that Storm Éowyn was the new Government’s first major hurdle to clear, and that they’ve failed to do so – miserably.
There is something distinctly unedifying about the degree of failure we’ve witnessed over the past week and a half or so since the storm blew through. To continue with the athletic imagery, rather than even make an attempt at jumping over it, it’s as though they’ve tried to avoid the obstacle altogether and crawl under it – despite being in full view of all of us in the peanut gallery – only for it to fall down, trapping and humiliating them.
It’s deeply ominous in hindsight that as Éowyn was slouching towards the country over the deep, dark sea, preparing to wreak a havoc the likes of which we hadn’t seen in living memory, the infantile 34th Dáil was breaking down in a dysfunctional shouting match, rendering it incapable, on that occasion, of electing the new taoiseach and so appointing the new government.
Little did those of us watching the chaos in the Dáil two weeks ago know that we weren’t seeing nuthin’ yet when it comes to a Government being incapable of carrying out its basic responsibilities. Like ensuring its citizens have access to the modern basics of electricity, heating and running water – especially its most vulnerable citizens.
Fast forward to yesterday, then, when the Dáil heard about a man who died because his medical equipment stopped working during the storm. Sinn Féin TD for Mayo Rose Conway-Walsh said she heard about this from a constituent, who told her that “the equipment that his father was using couldn’t be used – the mattress, the sleep apnoea, the several other pieces of equipment – they couldn’t be (used)”.
“When he went then to take his father to the doctor, he died in front of him.”
It wasn’t the first time power had gone out in the preceding months. Hundreds of thousands lost it for some time in December as a result of Storm Darragh, while others lost access to utilities like water in the weeks preceding Éowyn because of the cold snap. That’s all to say that it’s not like such things are unprecedented in recent years. Indeed, as Minister Dara Calleary said yesterday during a debate on the storm, “whilst Éowyn was unprecedented, it is now the precedent”.
If only that had been recognised sooner.
Now, I know that it’s not our ministers’ role to be out making sure every house in the country is connected to the grid, and that those connections and that that infrastructure are in optimal condition, but they do have some things in their power. Foremost among them, optics and ESB oversight.
To begin with the latter, State-owned ESB networks is responsible for carrying out maintenance, repairs and construction on the electricity grid, owning the transmission and distribution networks as it does. In this, it has a State-guaranteed monopoly, which obviously means that the public has no alternative or recourse when ESB lets them down in some way – such as it has done with Storm Éowyn.
That is not to cast aspersions on the engineers and maintenance workers who braved brutal conditions to get the show back on the road, bringing us down from a post-Éowyn peak of roughly 760,000 premises without power to around 18,000 now, mainly in the west of Ireland. Their work has truly been Trojan, and much appreciated by all those who were without power for any amount of time.
However, as my editor John McGuirk alluded to on X the other day, there is much more ESB could be doing in its monopolistic capacity. He wrote that “there should be a law that says if the ESB leaves you without power for more than 72 hours consecutively, it is required to buy and install for the customer a diesel generator”.
While no doubt somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there is some truth to it. After all, the Irish population has no alternative to some degree of dependency on the ESB. If they can’t get their act together, if they can’t prepare accordingly ahead of time, why shouldn’t they have to foot the bill for a generator for those left without.
Far from that, though, ESB Networks CEO Paddy Hayes warned earlier this week that costs will increase for customers in future because of the aftermath of Storm Éowyn. RTÉ reported:
“There is a cost associated by this that will ultimately be borne across the electricity network as a whole. It is a devastating and destructive storm, the likes of which we have never seen before.”
There may also be no compensation for those affected by Storm Éowyn. Mr Hayes said that the public service levy is not applicable during storms.
“That (the public service levy) doesn’t apply during a storm situation … ultimately those costs will be recovered by customers generally and would increase the cost base,” he said.
This is probably where the State should step in and insist, as has been suggested elsewhere, that the highly-profitable ESB pay the costs associated with this disaster. That would go a long way towards winning back some much needed goodwill for a government that has – clearly – gotten off on the wrong foot.
Because it can’t be doubted that it has. To turn to the second of those things mentioned above, optics, the government couldn’t have appeared to care less about the plight of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens if it tried. Not only did they push boldly ahead with their pre-planned, week-long break following the appointment of the new government, much of the talk that surfaced during that time was to do with insufficient gender balance among the ministers.
I realise that I’m using government loosely here and applying it to both the ruling coalition and opposition parties, who made the bigger fuss about gender balance, but that’s how the average voter sees it, and the government itself has that to contend with. The shouting match in the Dáil before the storm descended, despite being instigated by the opposition, sullied all parties as far as the public was concerned.
The sluggish rollout of humanitarian hubs was entirely in government hands, however, as was the snail’s pace with which the taoiseach travelled over to the west to visit some of those most badly affected by the storm.
All in all, about as bad a start, optically and practically, that a new government could wish for. Time will tell whether “lessons are learned” and whether some of our historically-impressive finances are truly put into hardening the electricity grid, but at the moment, Éowyn is increasingly looking like the perfect storm to usher in the present reign.