“My gums were cold, I was that cold,” says Caroline Harney, a reflexologist who lives in Barrymore, just outside Athlone, with her husband and two adult children.
On Tuesday afternoon, about the time Taoiseach Micheál Martin was getting an ear-bashing from a local up the road in Castlerea, Harney had arrived at St Brigid’s GAA club in Kiltoom, just outside the town on the Roscommon side of Lough Ree.
Without power since early Friday morning, she had come to the community hub at the GAA club, where Micheál Martin was due later in the afternoon. At St Brigid’s, volunteers have set up facilities for those without power or water. Kieran Kilkenny, the club’s underage chairman, estimates about 700 of the 1,400 homes in the locality lost services after Storm Éowyn.
As early as Saturday morning, people were coming to the club to charge their phones, Kilkenny says, but as the weekend wore on, more people came as families grappled without power or water. “Sunday got a little bit more people under pressure,” he says. A film was put on for children and a hall opened for them to kick a ball around. As the days dragged by, the reality of facing an extended period without heat and power began to emerge.
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“Once the light goes in the evening, it gets cold — and then it’s like: ‘what do you do now?’,” says Harney. Her parents live next door and her 86-year-old father spent three months in hospital last year. While he and her mother are bearing up okay, a friend of Harney’s was confronted with the stark situation where she could not blend food for her severely disabled daughter. Harney’s hot water bottle leaked on Monday night so to compound things, “I now have a cold wet bed that I can’t dry”.
With the rhythms of day-to-day life disrupted, simple tasks like making a family meal, and the inevitable jettisoning of freezers full of food have taken centre stage for people around St Brigid’s. “Everything is a huge amount of work to do anything,” says Harney. The club has opened its doors and may even host classes for a nearby school without power in the coming days.
Marie Donnellan, a volunteer with the club for 30 years, had her photograph taken with Martin when he rolled into St Brigid’s. The Taoiseach was given a by-and-large friendly reception despite the circumstances. “There is people that are badly impacted where I live now,” says Donnellan, who adds that she managed until her power was restored on Monday evening. “I manage because that’s the way I was reared, but the younger children and that, they don’t understand.”
Residents are also dealing with the financial impact — just at the end of January — of lost groceries, eating out or buying takeaways, or in some instances, staying in hotels.
Before Martin went out to be grilled on the State’s response, Harney said she was not looking for a handout. But she added: “I kind of feel now, where is the Government? Is there a national emergency, is there any support?”
Club chairman Alan MacNeice says he has neighbours with oxygen devices that need to be charged, some without water, and others with trees in their kitchen. He is slow to judge the Government’s response too harshly after an “extraordinary event”, saying communities are pulling together to see each other through the immediate aftermath.
“From a Government perspective, a more interesting question is: how are you going to build more resilience into the network in the face of climate change?” he asks.
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