Health Minister visits storm-impacted MUH

Electricity lines will have to go underground, said the Minister for Health during a visit to Mayo.

Minister Jennifer Carroll McNeill was speaking after meeting staff and management at Mayo University Hospital (MUH) last Tuesday.

“We are going to have to acknowledge that these storm events are too damaging to communities and we are going to have to build our electricity resilience in a totally different way in the future,” said the Minister.

She recognised Mayo was one of the worst storm-impacted counties in the country and that major investment is needed in energy and water infrastructure.

“The frustration of being left without power is extraordinary and that’s even more acute in rural areas.

“It’s not going to be possible to have trees near wires in the way that we have. We are going to have to do this differently in the future. Wires are going to have to go underground,” she added.

The Minister said while it is not her department, back-up generators at all water treatment plants should be mandatory. This was not the case in Mayo where there was widespread water outages.

“That was a point of weakness and a concern,” said the Minister.

She visited MUH as the hospital struggled to cope with large numbers of patients. The Minister said hospital staff had done “extraordinary work” during the storm.

Mayo is, of course, one of those counties mostly acutely impacted and we are still feeling the impact of that in our communities and in our hospital where we are seeing very large numbers in our emergency department.

“I wanted to come to the emergency department when it was at its busiest, not its quietest. I recognise that there has been good work done here over the past 12 months and that pressure on the emergency department has fallen quite significantly but today it is quite difficult,” she commented.

Sinn Féin TD Rose Conway Walsh told the Dáil last week that an elderly man in Mayo died after health equipment he relied upon at home could not be used because of Storm Éowyn.

“He had the mattress, the sleep apnoea machine, and several other pieces of equipment,” explained the TD. 

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.” 

The Sinn Féin TD said she could not understand why the Army was not brought in “from day one” to respond to the storm damage.