Just outside Cavan town, on the Dublin Road, is a townland called “Poles”. The name derives from an old land measure, not from the Irish for “hole”, as you might expect. But it’s unusually apt this week in one of the many areas where repair crews are working day and night to undo the damage of last week’s storm.
At a farmyard in neighbouring Cargagh on Thursday afternoon, Mick Horan from the ESB and a group of Austrians were standing over three new 12m wooden poles, awaiting the arrival of a specialist mechanical digger.
There aren’t enough diggers to go around this week, and the one due has been on three other jobs today already. Some patience is required.
In his 40 years with the ESB, Kildare man Horan has never seen anything like the damage done by Storm Éowyn, “because it wasn’t just concentrated in particular areas – it was everywhere”. Hence the presence of the Austrian reinforcements, whose unofficial spokesman finds himself doing yet another media interview pending the digger’s arrival.
Ralf, from Linz, prefers not to give his surname, because having the most fluent English in the group, he is in danger of becoming a full-time media celebrity and has too much actual work to do.
He and the others, all from the same part of northern Austria, got the SOS call on Saturday, met to plan logistics on Sunday, and on Monday at 5am set out for Ireland in their own cars, to carry all the emergency equipment needed.
They travelled through the night, sharing driving duties, and arrived 1,900km and 27 hours later, early on Tuesday. Since then they’ve been working from dawn to 8pm, while getting used to the Cavan’s drumlin terrain and “fighting with the local dialect”.
The hills and their “wet grass” (by which he may mean “muck”) take getting used to, but part of the reason Ralf and his colleagues are here is that the electricity system is very similar to home.
Only in built-up areas of Austria are cables underground, he says. As in Ireland, most of the countryside there is linked by “mid-voltage” overhead wires, even if the poles tend be bigger.
The digger crew is from a company in Buncrana, Co Donegal, that specialises in this sort of thing. One of them, Shane McGowan, says they’ve started every day this week at 7am and finished and 10pm or 11pm. And once they arrive at the latest “poling station” they get to work with surprising speed.
The digger bucket splits in two to grip one of the giant wooden beams and then looks a bit like an army tank as it speeds across rough land on caterpillar tracks, with the 12m “gun” pointing straight ahead.
But within minutes it has planted a new pole, six feet deep, to replace the damaged one. No sooner is that done than two of the Austrians don their crampons and climb it with alarming ease to attach the new aluminium cables.
The digger has quietly departed, meanwhile. When we see it again, minutes later, it’s two fields away, on the side of another drumlin, replacing the next pole down the line.
The dairy farmer in whose farmyard we began is one of the lucky – or well prepared – locals. As Horan points out, he has his own electrical transformer attached to the back of a tractor: “Milking all those cows, he’d be lost without that.”
But as terrible as the damage done last week was, the ESB veteran acknowledges that repair crews have been lucky with this week’s mild, dry weather. As it is, many crews are working out of bases – and sometimes leaving homes – that are themselves still without power.
Things could be worse, though. “Imagine being out all day and night in the cold and wet and then going home to a house that’s cold and dark as well.” Horan’s own place in Ballymore Eustace was not immune. It too was without power after the storm and not reconnected until Monday.
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