FERMANAGH rural residents who were left in the dark after Storm Eowyn, in some cases for weeks, have hit out at the complete lack of support they received, and called for urgent action now to stop the same situation happening again.
Despite residents of Scotland, England and Wales – areas that were not even as badly hit by the storm as Fermanagh –being compensated by their governments if they were left without power, householders here will not be offered a penny.
This week Northern Ireland Electricity (NIE) sent out letters confirming what everyone already knew, that they would no compensation will be paid to any residents of the North, no matter how long they were without power. Instead, they are being told to claim off their insurance.
This comes after it was revealed earlier this month that, because Stormont had failed to pass the necessary legislation in time, it would not be able to provide financial support to NIE to allow the power provider to pay compensation to affected customers.
A local mother who lives in the Brookeborough/Fivemiletown area questioned the assessment by Stormont that NIE had no responsibility to pay the compensation themselves, as they were not at fault, noting her house had already been encountering outages long before Eowyn arrived.
The woman, whose family was without power for eight days, told the ‘Herald they had been regularly reporting the fault on the line, which runs through local forestry land where trees often fall on it, for years now.
“As far as I’m concerned, they were aware they needed to do something on this line before this storm,” she said. “Obviously, they weren’t investing any infrastructure on that line.”
However, while she questioned whether NIE should be held accountable or not, the woman said the power provider had been up-front from the beginning in stating they had no liability and were not responsible for paying out compensation.
She said it should have been our government who stepped in to support residents, instead of trying to pass the buck to NIE, and called on the government to now take action to prevent households from being abandoned again in future.
She asked, “The big thing is where do we go from here? Who is accountable? Who is going to invest on these lines? What was our government doing?”
The woman added, “These storms are not going to be a one off, they’re going to become routine. They need to get this [legislation] signed in place. You have a responsibility here guys. You were caught asleep.”
Noting the lack of investment in the local electric grid was just one of many areas Fermanagh was being neglected, pointing to other areas such as roads and health, the woman said it was no time for government departments and associated bodies to stop shifting blame and responsibility to each other.
Calling for lessons to be learned from the crisis, she said the current situation was a result of “incompetence across the board.”
“We know there’s incompetence there, nobody had to wait for a storm to see that,” she said.
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