After more than four weeks without working phone lines, businesses and services in Headford are finally reconnected. It was confirmed by eir on Monday evening that service has been restored, bringing relief to a community that has endured serious disruption.
The outage, which began in mid-July, has caused significant problems for local organisations and businesses, including the Headford Health Centre, where 20 full- and part-time staff had to operate through a single redirected phone line using one staff member’s phone number. This placed a heavy burden on one staff member fielding calls for two GPs, secretarial services, and other healthcare needs.
Local businesses were also hit hard, including the only hotel located within the town, which was left with no functioning landline during peak tourist season, leaving potential guests unable to make bookings by phone. For many, email and social media became the only way to communicate with customers.
Local representative, Cllr Mary Hoade, who has been raising the issue with eir since the outage began, says that measures must be undertaken to ensure such outages do not happen again.
“I have written to eir and stated that, as they can appreciate, this has been a very difficult few weeks for business in Headford, and they should review the difficulties involved in resolving this issue so that business in the area should never again experience this,” said Cllr Hoade.
In a statement issued Monday, the HSE confirmed: “We have been advised this afternoon, Monday 11 August, that a fault impacting the landline at Headford Health Centre has been resolved. While the issue was outside the control of the HSE and the Health Centre team, we have been actively engaged with the service providers on a daily basis to ensure it was resolved as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and thank the public and our staff for their patience and understanding.”
eir has been asked to review the difficulties in resolving the fault and to outline steps to prevent future outages of this scale.
