An elderly man in Co Mayo died after health equipment he relied upon at home could not be used because of Storm Éowyn, a Sinn Féin TD has told the Dáil.
“He had the mattress, the sleep apnoea machine, and several other pieces of equipment,” Sinn Féin Mayo TD Rose Conway-Walsh said.
When his son “went to take him to the doctor, his father died in front of them. That is the tragedy of it. That is how urgent this is.”
She could not understand why the Army was not brought in “from day one” to respond to the storm damage.
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Earlier, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said capital investment on the electricity grid would have to increase from €5 billion in the period 2020-2025 to €13 billion for the following five-year period.
“That is the level of change and investment that will be required to make our grid resilient,” he said.
Speaking ahead of a three-hour Dáil debate on Storm Éowyn, he said the storm was unprecedented in living memory, as TDs highlighted the impact of the storm on families and property.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said the ESB was “sitting on vast profits” but was planning to pass the cost of repairing the storm damage on to customers.
Her party colleague Mairéad Farrell said electricity poles in Connemara “are literally rotting and breaking easily”. She said “fundamentally we need investment in basic infrastructure”.
Labour leader Ivana Bacik said: “I’ve heard from families who were tragically forced to wake their dead relatives by candlelight, from parents unable to cook a hot meal for their bored and cold young children and from older people left terrified and isolated by power outages and fallen trees.” She said she heard from others who were forced to miss medical appointments.
Minister for Housing James Browne, whose department takes the lead in such emergencies, said arrangements had been put in place to make personnel and equipment from the Defence Forces, the Civil Defence and the National Parks and Wildlife Service available to ESB Networks to help with power restoration.
“I have to make clear that it is not possible to act in a ‘just in case’ situation. Any suggestion that generators or other supports could have been put in place before the storm hit is incorrect,” Mr Browne said.
He acknowledged the extreme hardship people faced, while Minister for Climate Change Darragh O’Brien said an enhanced winter 2025 resilience plan would be put in place within the next month and would be implemented between March and October.
Social Democrats TD Jennifer Whitmore claimed the Government was “missing in action” during the clear-up after the storm. “There was no plan,” she said, adding the Taoiseach “left it to the ESB to do the heavy lifting”.
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