On hold for 121 days

Phone outages cause havoc in west Cavan

A local woman who only got her landline phone service restored last Friday (April 25), four months after Storm Éowyn, believes there is a massive disconnect between the standard of service provided to those living in rural and urban areas. Barbara ‘Bee’ Smith is a poet and creative writing facilitator living in Dowra with her husband Tony Cuckson. She is best known for her work curating the Cuilcagh Lakelands Geopark Poetry Map. She also facilitated the community arts project ‘Bringing St Brigid’s Cloak to Life’ in 2024.

Aside from the personal inconvenience, and at a time when her own family was going through a difficult time, the kind-hearted Bee was most worried for the health and well-being of elderly and vulnerable neighbours.

Storm Éowyn was a powerful record-breaking extratropical cyclone, which hit Ireland on January 24, causing widespread power outages and broadband disruption, affecting hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses.

Despite her home being reconnected late on Friday last week, 121 days after the line went dead, it wasn’t until the following Monday (April 28), that someone from eir contacted Bee at home to inform her that the service had been restored. She lives just outside Dowra village in the townland of Cordressogagh.

From the US originally, Bee met her Armagh-born husband while living in London, before moving to live in Cavan more than two decades ago.

“We got it today,” says a relieved Bee when speaking to the Celt on Monday afternoon. “We have not had a landline since the storm on January 24 until today when eir rang me and the person on the other end of the phone said ‘oh, you were actually reconnected on Friday!’ Well, nobody actually rang to tell us that.”

- Scroll down for eir response -

What makes matters more difficult is that all of Bee relatives live in the US, and Tony’s families reside north of the Border. “They both come under international rates on the mobile phone,” she outlined the added expense.

Bee kept with her a Vodafone pay-as-you-go phone but, even for that, post Storm Éowyn, she found service to be “patchy”.

The difficulties became apparent after Tony’s brother died on February 5, and organising the funeral details fell to him. Long distance, and with no phone or internet, the couple were frantically forced to rely on the kindness of neighbours living in areas where connections had been restored, several miles from their own home.

“Even before that, Tony’s brother was in hospital with pneumonia and making contact with them to see how his condition was wasn’t easy. At one point for us, to be able to contact the hospital, we had to go seven miles down the lane to friends of ours, in Blacklion, right next to the border, and because of that, and the way mobile signals often crossover in that area, they had international unlimited calls and loaned us their phone to find out what was happening.”

She says community spirit in the west of the county shone through. “The people here are great.”

Regardless of their predicament, Bee was all too aware of how others in the area were affected. Bee and Tony have friends who rely on wearing a pendant alarm. With no phone connection, the system is redundant. One man she knew didn’t get his phone service back for 63 days.

Fianna Fáil TD for Cavan-Monaghan, Brendan Smith, has by now made numerous representations to telecom providers on behalf of constituents regarding their phone and broadband services.

The issue has also been raised in the Dáil, and includes highlighting the impact not just on households and individuals, but also farms, businesses, community facilities and schools. He is now calling for a strategic, long-term approach to protecting Ireland’s telecommunications networks in the face of increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

Deputy Smith recently told Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Darragh O’Brien: “Storms like this, when they hit our infrastructure, they disproportionately impact rural Ireland, leaving those most vulnerable in society, like the elderly, most at risk.”

He added: “Now it is about being proactive, not reactive, thinking in terms of long-term strategy, not just short-term fixes. I welcome the measures that Minister Darragh O’Brien is bringing forward and I look forward to working with him on their implementation.”

Efforts meanwhile are underway to develop a Sectoral Adaptation Plan (SAP) for Communications Networks, set to be published by September, and to implement key EU directives, which will raise resilience standards across both cyber and physical infrastructure.

All storm faults repaired in the west - eir

eir has said that all Storm Éowyn reported faults in the west of County Cavan have now been repaired and phone and broadband services restored.

They issued the statement to The Anglo-Celt this week in which the company noted “unprecedented damage” to Ireland’s telecommunication network as a result of the record-breaking storm.

To date, over 2,000 individual faults across County Cavan alone have been resolved, eir claim.

The statement further explained: “The scale of the damage caused by Éowyn, and complex nature of some faults that required extensive engineering works, meant that a small number of customers have experienced delays in restoration of service.”

Interim mobile solutions were provided where appropriate.

“Vulnerable customers are being prioritised once identified,” the statement continued.

“As the telecommunications network does not have automatic fault detection, all service issues must be reported directly to eir to be logged and addressed,” it further explained.

“A key cause of disruption was trees on third-party land falling onto the network infrastructure. Delays in some areas resulted from the fact that private companies like eir do not have authority to manage or remove trees on private property. Although eir requested assistance from local authorities for tree removal at approximately 200 sites nationwide, this support was not secured. Where local assistance was unavailable, eir sourced specialist crews from outside the jurisdiction to carry out the necessary work,” concluded the statement.