Let there be light! Halloween saved in Mayo housing estate after 6 week blackout

Street lighting was restored over the weekend to the Ard Lugalisheen housing estate in Ballindine, Co Mayo, ending a six-week outage that left 22 households without public lighting as the evenings drew in.

The ESB reconnected the supply after weeks of uncertainty.

Jess Walsh, who has lived in the estate with her family for more than a decade, told The Mayo News that residents were relieved. After six weeks “in the dark”, she said, the estate feels much safer, particularly for children and for people coming and going after nightfall. Families, she added, can now enjoy Halloween “in comfort”.

As reported last week in The Mayo News, many of the households are families with young children, and more than a dozen children live in the estate, which is within walking distance of the local creche and primary school.

Residents had warned that shift workers were walking through the estate in pitch darkness in the early morning.

One mother told The Mayo News that trick or treating would have been difficult without lighting, as parents were not prepared to send children out in the dark.

Ms Walsh also described children playing football who could not find their ball at dusk and had to go indoors.

A long-running dispute

The outage followed years of problems in the estate. Residents lived for nine years with exposed manholes and no street lighting before the lights were switched on at the start of last year. Mayo County Council is in the process of taking over the estate’s green area and public lighting.

Residents said the disconnection and health and safety notices were addressed generically to “sir/madam” or to a management company they say does not exist.

They said this left them unable to deal with the ESB directly, because data protection rules prevented the company from discussing an account not held in an individual’s name.

When imminent takes two weeks

Two weeks before the lights returned, Padraic Flanagan, Head of the Claremorris-Swinford Municipal District, told the October municipal district meeting that the council had done what was needed. He said that “all the requirements have been met” and that reconnection was expected imminently.

He said the council had been in regular contact with the ESB and had lodged a cash deposit, and pointed to its extensive work in the estate, including a full renewal of the public lighting and the redoing of roads and services.

Cllr Patsy O’Brien questioned why the disconnection went ahead while the council was negotiating to take over the estate and would become the main source of payment. He stressed that his criticism was not aimed at ESB staff, whom he praised as “fabulous workers”.

He said the problem lay at a senior level, and that because notices went to a fictitious person, residents could not use the normal data protection channels, leaving the council as the only link with the ESB. He said he would raise the matter with senior ESB officials.

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