(Monday, 19th January 2009) As a result of the very severe and dangerous storm conditions over the weekend, extensive damage has been caused to eircom’s network across the country. In particular the worst affected areas include parts of Mayo and the western seaboard, Louth, South Kilkenny and Waterford.

The gale force winds, heavy rainfall and lightning storms have resulted in a nationwide trail of destruction. There are a large number of locations with significant infrastructural damage to overhead wires caused by falling trees as well as a large number of fallen and damaged telephone poles. Throughout the weekend, eircom has had crews working on these priority situations where there is a road blockage or an immediate danger to the public.

There are currently up to 7,300 telephone faults on our network. We expect this number to rise in the coming days as we continue to assess the impact of the storm on our network and the current weather warnings remain in place and the expected bad weather continues to take its toll.

eircom has put in place its storm response plan with significant extra resourcing deployed to restore service as quickly as possible to all of our customers.

We expect our call centres will handle an exceptionally high level of calls in the coming days and this may result in some customers experiencing delays in their calls being answered. eircom would also like to remind our customers that faults can be reported to the "Log a Fault" section of our website www.eircom.ie

eircom would like to assure all of our customers that we are making every effort to repair the damage and our engineers continue to work in extremely difficult conditions to restore service to customers as soon as possible.