Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions Dail Éireann — 2026-01-13 ============================================================ Roderic O'Gorman (GP), Dublin West Absolutely, community supports are important and need to be improved but the Taoiseach has not addressed the issue of getting power back to people as quickly as possible and making sure we are resourced to do that. Last January, the strongest critique of Government's failure after Storm Éowyn was not getting power back to people quickly enough. In Mayo, 43,000 people lost power at the height of the storm; seven days later, 17,500 were still without power. In Galway, it was even worse: 59,000 people lost power on the day and seven days later 31,000 were still without power. That is why it is so important we have mutual aid agreements so we can get more engineers on the ground more quickly to help the ESB address those power outages. I ask the Taoiseach to address the point as to whether the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, will meet with the Climate Change Advisory Council to understand why it thinks the Government's storm preparedness plans are not good enough. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-13/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-13