Storm Éowyn caused damage to more than 130 County Council houses across Galway earlier this year.

The local authority has confirmed that a total of 136 County Council tenants logged requests for repairs of their homes following the severe January storm.

That represented almost 5% of its entire housing stock.

Ger Scully, Senior Executive Officer in Galway County Council’s Housing Department, said most complaints related to roofing damage during the red weather alert.

The Council now has an online system where tenants can log the repairs they need, which speeds up the repair process.

“The ability of tenants to rapidly log repairs was evident during Storm Éowyn where from the night of January 24 to Sunday, January 26, some 113 of 136 repairs were logged by tenants themselves or their reps both during and after the red alert. Most referred to roofing damage,” Mr Scully said.

He said the reporting of the repairs helped Council staff “to rapidly identify which housing estates were the worst affected” and which needed immediate attention.

This “helped us to secure contracts with specialist roofing contractors at the earliest opportunity”, Mr Scully added.

Galway County Council had a housing stock of 3,085 units. It was a ‘huge’ portfolio of properties it had to manage, he said.

The maintenance budget was just €1.6m he said — and “ideally we would like to see that increased”, Mr Scully told councillors in Ballinasloe.

In 2024, the County Council received 4,618 requests to repair items in its housing stock.

Just 1,444 of these requests were deemed valid — the remainder were deemed to be the responsibility of the tenant.

Some 1,111 complaints were logged for housing located in Ballinasloe Municipal District. Of these, 120 were refused as they were deemed to be the responsibility of the tenant; and 209 referred to complaints that had been previously logged by the tenants and dealt with or previously refused.

Mr Scully explained that a further 107 housing repair complaints in Ballinasloe related to new properties where the repairs were referred to the developer for investigation, if the repair was within the period for defect repair by the developer.

Use of the online repair logging system has grown since the County Council introduced it in 2021 – now more than 80% of repair requests are logged online.

Last year, just 8% of all repair logs were done by phone.

Pictured: Trees that were felled by Storm Éowynn near Williamstown.