It’s in times of trouble that communities show their true colours – and that was clearly the case in Dunmore where power post-Éowyn was not restored in some parts until last week.

The elderly and most vulnerable in the area were provided with hot meals by a dedicated group of volunteers over a 20-day period when many were left in darkness with no heat.

Former Councillor Joe Sheridan was to the fore of the emergency response initiative that provided both food packages and fuel to those in most need.

Even local tradesmen provided their services free of charge to fix roofs, gutters, gates and fencing for the elderly residents in the locality.

The Dunmore Emergency Response Team kicked into action when they discovered the severity of the storm and the impact it had on the elderly, in particular, but also families who had no access to assistance.

Dozens of volunteers gave of their services to help out and, in fairness, many elderly groups described their work as being vital. The Emergency Response Team includes people from business, sports organisations and facilities experts and spent 3,500 voluntary hours over a 20 day period of outage to mop up and clean up after the crisis.

This includes the provision of over 2,000 hot meals and 300 vulnerable home visitations thru the HSE, Galway County Council, the ESB, GP services and local requests on the ground.

It included the provision of ‘food for thought‘ care packs and up to 500 ‘fuel for life’ packs not including house visitations to people whom just needed a friendly face, a chat and human interaction from the outside world.

“We coordinated and organised relocations for some families and set up 40 mini homes in villages with prolonged outage,” said Joe Sheridan.

“The handyman programme fixed up over 20 vulnerable homes which involved temporarily fixing, roofs, gutters, gates and fixing and or replacing fridges with burnt out compressors from reduced mains grid voltages and surges.

“These 3,500 volunteer hours will be lost if we don’t impress on Government for a need for an emergency response for towns in the North Galway area,” he added.

The local publican said that towns like Dunmore weres self-sufficient as far back 1934 when a mini-grid generator was provided as a back-up in the event of a loss of power. But he explained that even the grid even went down.

Mr Sheridan said that it supplied electrical power to the GP, dentist, the pharmacy, post office and the local community centre at the time which needed heat.

“It also provided power to essential retail to ensure that country life in emergency situations could be maintained. But it didn’t kick in on this occasion which meant that a lot of people were left freezing in their own homes.”

Pictured: Some members of the Dunmore Emergency Response team Mark Jennings, Joe Sheridan, Claire Reilly, John Mulrennan, Brian Keating, Damien Colman and Barry Murray at one of the local hubs that they organised during the power outages caused by Storm Eowyn. Photo: Jacinta Fahy Photography.