Roy Keane, one of Ireland’s most famous sons, famously tried to live by the motto, ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’. As Ireland still struggles to cope with the aftermath of Storm Eowyn, it has become abundantly clear that the Irish government failed to pay heed to Keane’s sage advice.

Storm Eowyn (named by the UK Met Office after a character in The Lord of the Rings, for some strange reason) was the fifth major weather event to batter Ireland’s west coast in the 2024/2025 storm season. It arrived shortly after Storm Darragh, the cyclone which swept across Ireland and the UK in the first week of last December. Darragh was destructive enough itself and left 325,000 homes, business and farms without power. For those who had spent much of the Christmas period trying to get their homes and farms back to proper working order, the prospect of another storm, even more severe, was the last thing they needed to hear.

Yet when Eowyn hit land in January, many people, but more importantly the authorities and the government, seemed woefully ill-prepared. As Eowyn caused chaos across the West of Ireland, the damage is expected to run into the hundreds of millions, with insurance companies alone estimating they face a €250 million bill.

Thousands of commercially planted trees were uprooted, which caused an untold number of collapsed power lines; heavy storms added to flooding and a weakening of the top soil. The winds were so bad in Donegal that a tree crashed on top of a 20 year old’s car, killing him. An estimated 725,000 homes and businesses have been left without power.

The fact that this storm hit almost precisely the same areas that were most impacted by Darragh just added to the misery. But the lax response by the government, and the planning laws introduced by the previous government, have added to the fury.

Ireland is hardly immune to extreme weather events, but the cost of Eowyn and the length of time it has taken to repair the original damage has become a major political headache for a new government which, like its Labour counterpart in the UK, has not been granted any honeymoon period by voters.

To the bewilderment of many Irish people who were still trying to pick up the pieces left by Eowyn, the Dail decided to take a two week break in the middle of the crisis because they had just finalised the formation of the new coalition government between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

It seemed a strangely tone deaf and rather self-defeating decision by a new government which is already unpopular and led to immediate condemnation from the opposition parties. Sinn Fein, the Social Democrats and Aontu all demanded the Dail be immediately reconvened to discuss what had by then become a clear national emergency. Independent Ireland’s Michael Collins spoke for many when he said: ‘While half the country grapples with the devastation caused by Storm Eowyn, the government has chosen to take an extended holiday. This inaction is making a mockery of the new administration and leaving our citizens to fend for themselves.’

The reappointed Taoiseach Micheal Martin finally addressed the issue after a week of near-silence, and only after being publicly harangued in Roscommon by one angry woman who had endured four serious power cuts in 12 months. Martin was quick to thank the emergency services and even quicker to absolve both this and the previous administration of any blame or accountability.

He insisted the government hadn’t been lax in requesting emergency EU aid (Romania ultimately provided emergency workers and generators because Ireland, one of the richest countries in the western world, could not provide them). Martin also suggested that Ireland needed to ‘adapt’ more to extreme weather events because of climate change.

But the establishment argument in favour of more green policies is also being blamed for the disproportionate hardship being endured by people from Kerry to Donegal and into the Irish midlands.

Under green policies, people in these areas were forced to ditch their own generators. New houses were built without chimneys to stop the burning of fossil fuels inside them. And they have bizarrely also been urged to buy expensive electric cars so they can use them as a power source when the grid fails.

As Irish businessman and former presidential candidate, Declan Ganley, who lives in a part of Galway which was left powerless for more than two weeks, said on Irish radio station Newstalk, far from saving the planet, green restrictions were making an already bad situation exponentially worse.

He called for an immediate repeal of all carbon taxes on fossil fuels used to heat homes, adding: ‘These are the only things that are working right now. This is how we’re working our generators and the chainsaws that we are using to cut ourselves out of a mess that they have played a major part if making. The government is not responsible for the weather but they are responsible for these policies which place people in a much tougher situation than they deserve to be.’

To add insult to injury by those who went without power for so long (including grieving families in Mayo and parts of rural Ireland forced to hold traditional funeral wakes by candle light, in a grim reminder of famine times), Irish energy supplier ESB has announced that they have no plans to introduce a compensation plan for those who have been left power since the middle of January. As it stands, 25,000 homes have been warned they still won’t have power until the weekend. The cost, both economic and social has been exorbitant.

It is a cost that many are determined this government will pay for – one way or the other.