OPINION: Is there anyone in charge here?

Some years ago I was on car parking duty in Murrisk very early in the dark morning of Reek Sunday. The weather was dreadful: heavy rain and gale force winds. A few hours earlier it was announced that the 'Reek' had been cancelled because climbing conditions were dangerous. A sign was put up on the approach road to the pilgrim path just outside our cottage, stating that the Masses usually said from dawn in the summit Chapel would not now take place. The clergy were setting a good example and not going up that mountain.

People were disappointed, but most continued to climb, undeterred. Reek pilgrims are a hardy lot! Others got out of their cars in the muddy field, took one look at the weather, and climbed back in. But I would guess that about three quarters of the arrivals braved the mountain climb.

I was sheltering under a tree at the time, drinking a much needed mug of tea that had been brought to the parking helpers by the late Johnny Groden, the then Chair of the Murrisk Development Association, and was chatting to a Garda Superintendent who was in charge of the garda presence for the pilgrimage. He told me an interesting story.

A group of Dutch police had visited Ireland the previous year, to observe how large-scale public events were handled by our authorities. They were brought to the Reek as an example of a complex public outdoor event with large numbers attending, in conditions that are never quite ideal, and could sometimes be very dangerous.

The Superintendent was asked by the Dutch police: “Who is in charge here?”. I was astonished when he told me that he had to admit that nobody was actually in charge. He could stand on the pilgrim path and advise people to turn back, but he had no legal powers to compel them to do so.

The Dutch cops were surprised. They explained that in the Netherlands the local Mayor (think, mayor of Westport) was in charge of the local police force and he would have the legal authority to authorise the closure of the mountain when climbing conditions were dangerous, and for that order to be implemented by the police. No messing!

Unprecedented devastation

My reflections on the aftermath of Storm Éowyn brought this memory back to mind. Éowyn was an event where unprecedented devastation took place and the country (actually, mainly the western counties) had to pick themselves up afterwards. The village of Murrisk has a community WhatsApp site, and in the aftermath of the storm there were many confused exchanges as villagers sought information about electricity, water and broadband re-connection. The sources of information appeared to come from random encounters with ESB or Eir repair workers in the field, who tended to pass on misleading messages of imminent re-connections that seldom ever came to pass.

Although some adjoining villages (eg Lecanvey) opened their community centres to provide hot drinks and food to vulnerable people, there was no centralised local source of information about restoration of utilities where reliable updates could be conveyed to disconnected users. Of course, the repair work gradually got done (except for broadband, still down at the time of writing) and was possibly executed as quickly and efficiently as possible. The Heath-Robinson character of many of our western utilities (rickety, barely kept going by incessant tinkering) were never going to be easy to repair after massive storm damage.

But imagine if there had been a much more serious outcome from the storm. One that left much more structural damage, injuries and deaths in its wake. Then the absence of good local information gathering and distribution almost certainly would have had many fatal consequences.

An obvious agent of co-ordination is local government. But local government in Ireland is not actually very 'local'. County Councils are organised centrally at county level, with a degree of sub-division into Municipal Districts. However, organisation, power, initiative and action comes from centre, and even then freedom of action is extremely cash constrained. The utilities (electricity, water, broadband) are operated by national top-down agencies, and there appears to be very limited visible co-ordination between local government and these utilities.

Local co-ordination

If Mayo towns of any size (say, 500 or more) had French-style Mayors, the ability to co-ordinate locally would be significantly improved. Here, local knowledge on the ground and power to co-ordinate utility companies could produce a more effective and less fraught outcome. A dynamic Mayor with a good team and local knowledge would be reassuring.

Consider the air defence system put in place in Britain before the 1940 Battle of Britain. Data on the approaching German bombers were gathered and collated centrally in a way that permitted the RAF to deploy its fighters precisely to where they were most needed, rather than dispersing them randomly all along the Channel coast. The ability of the RAF to defeat the vastly larger Luftwaffe owed as much to the power of information gathering and co-ordination as to the bravery of the 'few'.

In the case of Storm Éowyn, the west of Ireland dodged a bullet. Next time we might not be so lucky. The poor organisation and co-ordination of the recovery services were palpable. Correcting this would not be expensive, at least in Children’s Hospital or Dublin Metro-Link terms. The probability of another Éowyn is not zero and the potential for widespread damage and destruction will keep rising. We need to prepare for that now. Éowyn has dramatically exposed the inadequacy and lack of co-ordination in the way we handle extreme weather events and the disconnected nature of our governance systems. We will ignore this lesson at our peril.