Kettle's Boyled: Applying blame instead of doing maintenance

When something goes wrong, the first thing people seem to want to do is to find somebody to blame. If you’ve tripped over the edge of a footpath, somebody must be to blame and maybe they should pay you a bundle of money, as well as the entire cost of the legal process. The person picking up the bill is usually ‘the public purse,’ another name for the rest of us.

It was good to see recent examples of push-back by judges on this whole tripping into money culture. One individual, who according to the judge should have been looking where they were going, lost their case last week and had to pay everybody’s costs. A few more of these wins by the taxpayer might stop some of the opportunist claims that are based on the assumption that somebody else is to blame when things go wrong.

During the recent storms, our Taoiseach was berated by many people when he toured the worst affected areas to see the damage for himself. There seemed to be some kind of an expectation out there that Michael Martin should somehow pay people whose electricity was off for a protracted period. Some of the commentary almost went so far as to blame him for the storm itself.

There is no doubt that as a country we were badly prepared for this weather event, despite multiple warnings over the last few years about changing weather patterns. Our electricity, water and telephone networks proved not to be fit for purpose, but instead of questioning that lack of preparedness by utility companies, we blame the trees that fell on the lines.

Somebody once said that the problem with a storm isn’t that the wind blows, it’s what the wind blows. A puff of wind won’t hurt you, but if it is carrying a few slates or a tree, that’s a different story. Most of us take precautions by staying indoors, but the utility companies seem to just wait and see what breaks, and then go and fix it. It puzzles me that telecommunications companies in particular are given licenses for mobile networks without being obliged to fit backup generators to phone masts.

The same applies to the electricity network. It’s no use blaming trees; if the grid operators know there is a risk from individual trees, they need to have them pruned. If a line is running through a break in a forest, it should be put underground. There are no technical issues that mitigate against all that.

The recent storms showed that this kind of investment has been skimped on over the last few decades, but instead of looking for somebody to blame, the issues just need to be addressed. The next time we get a weather event like this, the people worst affected this time must be guaranteed they won’t have to suffer a repeat of this chaos.