Mr. T.J. Malone:

The Senator is right, Storm Éowyn was the most destructive and powerful storm we have seen in possibly 200 years in this country. From a geographical point of view it mapped right across the country. The entire country was under a red warning. However it is important to note that, within 48 hours of that storm, we had 70% of our customers who were impacted back up. Within a week we had 90% of them back up and within three weeks we had 99% back up, despite the ferocity of the storm.

There are huge lessons to be learned and I will let Ms Meyer talk a little about some of the lessons in a minute. Every one of our cabinets in our main exchanges has battery back-up ranging from five hours to 20 hours, depending on the criticality of it. The majority have over ten hours. We have up to 40 generators and we are supplementing the number of generators. We have up to 33 and are putting in another six. We have seen that, once we know where the storm will hit we need to move the generators more quickly to those locations. We found that we could not travel during the critical period - the red warning period - and that roads were blocked in certain areas and we could not get access. What we will do is, in the event of a storm, is move closer before the storm.

We have invested significantly in bespoke software which I believe is industry-leading, not just in Ireland but across Europe and the world. Ms Meyer's team have developed that over the past number of months. I will let her give more detail but, to give one example, a ticket that would have taken us 40 minutes to raise during the storm can now be done in 40 seconds. We have invested significantly in that and I will ask Ms Meyer to give some more detail as to what we are doing on this.