Severe weather left thousands of homes around the State without electricity for part of the Christmas period.
Late last night, ESB crews were working to restore power to around 500 homes in west Cork, which had been badly hit by lightning storms. More than 100 three-man crews were on standby last night in expectation of further lighting storms.
Winds of up to 80 m.p.h. in the two days before Christmas left up to 8,000 homes without an electrical supply for a few hours on Christmas Eve. Power lines were downed in areas dotted around the State, with counties Kerry, Galway and Kilkenny particularly badly affected.
In Co Cork, Bantry, Middleton and Bandon were worst hit, with power lines downed by falling trees and other debris whipped up by the storm. A significant number of homes in the Co Kerry towns of Tralee, Killorglin, Abbeydorney and Causeway were also without power.
While ESB emergency network technicians managed to restore power to all but 700 homes by midnight on December 24th, lightning storms the next day meant as many as 3,000 homes were without power for a time on Christmas Day.
ESB technicians were able to watch the Christmas Day lightning storms arriving on the south-west coast using their satellite monitoring equipment in the board's national control centre. The storms covered the west coast from Kerry to Galway and moved inland to Tipperary and Limerick.
A spokesman for the ESB said the storms produce "huge levels of power, many times the electricity produced by any artificial source". The lightning strikes damaged both power lines and transformers. Some 300 ESB technicians were involved in repairs on Christmas Day, with some working until the early hours of St Stephen's Day to repair damaged lines. By the time they finished shortly after midnight, they had reduced the number of houses without power to as few as 150.
The lightning storms struck again between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. yesterday, knocking out the power supply of 1,000 customers. By late morning, the number of houses without power climbed to 3,000.
Scarcely any homes were without power by teatime yesterday, but shortly afterwards the lightning struck again, this time in the west of Co Cork and in Newcastle West in Co Limerick.
So far, damage has been "very significantly less than this time last year", a spokesman for the ESB said. More than 150,000 houses lost power in each of the last two Christmas periods, when winds reached speeds of up to 120 m.p.h. However, even though the weather had been "nowhere as severe as last year", the bad weather had extended over a longer period this year, the spokesman said.
The 500 electrical technicians who worked over Christmas would receive on-call payments but that "will never compensate them for losing another Christmas with their families", the ESB spokesman added. He said many of the technicians had to work in hazardous conditions including high winds and lightning.