Mr. T.J. Malone:

Since Storm Éowyn, in fairness, the Minister pulled together a task committee and put us all into the one room to do this. Every single operator got hit during the storm and the ESB was no exception. It lost nearly 800,000 customers at the time. It has set up its own workforce within ESB since then and it is working really well with us and the industry. It has now accepted all of our critical 205 exchanges I talked about onto its critical prioritisation list. In the event of a storm now, they get priority, or are on the ESB's priority list to get power restored as quickly as possible. We did not have that beforehand, although we did try to have it. In fairness, the ESB has responded really well and has now installed what it calls storm managers who will communicate with us pre-, post- and during the storm. They will have somebody available and have communications every six hours to give us an update as to where it is.

The real piece NBI would like to get to with the ESB is an API into the network checker it has on each individual household in order that we will be able to understand exactly which houses are with and without power.