Kilcullen shops face electricity cut on busiest day of week

Kilcullen's main street businesses have had to go to their local TD in order to try and change a planned ESB Networks outage scheduled for next Saturday, writes Brian Byrne.

Following phone representations with the company that didn't seem to help, James Nolan of Nolan's Butchers has asked Minister of State Martin Heydon TD to intervene. "It's the busiest day of the week for local retail businesses in Kilcullen, by a country mile," he told the Diary this morning. "And now that a lot of people are back at work, they have reverted to doing their main shopping on weekends."

Main street residents and businesses received notice that power will be shut off between 9am-4.30pm on Saturday, necessitated 'to upgrade our networks'. When James finally got through to a person — "after going through all the automated thing on the number they gave, I was then told to contact a different number" — he was told that the weekend was chosen so that 'schools wouldn't be upset'. "The schools will be closed for the Easter break in the following two weeks, so why didn't they think of that?"

The other issue is that the last time an all-day period was notified, the actual shutdown only lasted 50 minutes. "At the very least they should be able to give us a tighter timeline."

All the shops on the street are in agreement on the matter, and they're now waiting to see if ministerial intervention will help. 

(Listen to James Nolan speaking on the issue below.)

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