Editorial: It has taken far too long to restore power to all properties in Northern Ireland

​Something extraordinary has happened in Northern Ireland over the weekend with the power outages.

​Around 200,000 properties were without power well into Saturday, more than 24 hours after they lost electricity in Friday’s storm.

At the height of the power losses on Friday, almost 300,000 properties were out – approaching a third of all homes and businesses. Even last evening, 75,000 properties were without power and so without light and, in most cases, heat unless they were able to light a fire or use another source to keep warm.

This is what the insurers used to call an ‘act of God’ and there is only so much that can be done in certain situations. After all, wind speeds almost hit 100mph on Friday in NI (92mph in Killowen), meaning that Ulster was one of the worst hit parts of the British Isles. Galway, on Ireland’s west coast, got the worst blast of the storm, with a recorded wind speed of 114mph. Scotland also saw 100mph gusts. These places are exposed to the Atlantic.

At the same time, though, was it not possible to get power restored earlier than this? Was every agency, every relevant Stormont ministry and its staff, and so on, working over the weekend to help the heroic emergency services in support roles?

The question is pertinent because this newspaper was almost alone in the great freeze of 2010 when we examined the role played by holiday leave in the then water crisis. It turned out that there had been some difficulty in getting civil servants in relevant departments to come off holiday. There were problems manning phone lines.

There is also the question of infrastructure. Has Stormont’s effective ring-fencing of all sorts of non-essential spends, from the west Belfast festival to free prescriptions to, recently, almost a commitment to spend £400m on a stadium meant that our electricity network is fraying like our water and other infrastructure?