Medical Aids and Appliances
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-15
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Neale Richmond (FG), Dublin Rathdown

The review of Storm Éowyn, published in October of last year, by the Department of housing recognised the particular challenges of providing humanitarian support to vulnerable people during emergencies, acknowledging the complex and multisectoral nature of developing effective response measures and the complexities of defining, reporting and sharing information in relation to vulnerable people.
However, it did more than just acknowledge it. Some of the recommendations of the review include exploring outreach structures to ensure communication is possible with vulnerable and isolated people in the event of an emergency, where typical challenges of communication are unavailable, and that the area of vulnerable people be further developed under the auspices of the Government task force on emergency planning. The Department will continue to engage with relevant processes developed as a result of Storm Éowyn and, where appropriate, link industry with developments in State response measures, including central government and local government.
The review recognises the importance of the role that An Post played during Storm Éowyn. When the impact of the storm on telecoms and data infrastructure made contacting people difficult, An Post staff delivering post provided a direct link to persons living in remote locations and checked on the welfare of older or vulnerable individuals. An Post has indicated a willingness to continue to support the co-ordinated response to a national or local emergency in this capacity.
The ComReg consumer care team is also dedicated to offering help to all consumers who may experience difficulties with their mobile phones, home phones or broadband providers, including vulnerable elderly people and consumers with disabilities who experience difficulties in outages or have no service. Where a consumer has difficulty with a provider, it recommends contacting its consumer care team, which can be done via a wide variety of channels outlined on its website. An information campaign is under way now to make sure that people are aware of those channels and that it is not simply when the event happens that people are desperately seeking around to know how to make contact, particularly when that might be the very reason the person is having to make contact.

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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/2026-01-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-15