Rachel Connolly, the Co Roscommon woman who rebuked Taoiseach Micheál Martin for a lack of preparation and a poor response to Storm Éowyn, has said she did not set out to “confront” the Taoiseach.
Ms Connolly, from Cloonkeen, Castlerea, said she was expressing the frustration of the local community and the “growing dichotomy” between the east and west during her widely publicised encounter with the Taoiseach while he was visiting a hub in the town, set up to assist people without power in the aftermath of last week’s storm, on Tuesday.
Ms Connolly said she was charging her mobile phone at a hub when “all of a sudden there was an influx of national media” and “then he came in and there was an awful lot of glad-handing and I tried to ask the question and he shut me down”.
She said, “anybody that knows me, knows that’s a red rag to a bull”.
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Ms Connolly said she had been speaking to people about the challenges of living without power “because I knew I was a person that had no problem communicating that there were other people here who wouldn’t be of that nature”.
“He was here to have his photograph taken, to be seen to be here, to be caring, and yet nothing was actually being done. It was just purely a PR exercise,” she said.
“And why would you let that go? Why would you? That’s not appropriate under the circumstances. So that was the choice that I made then was to initiate that conversation with him.”
She said the responses she heard from the Taoiseach were the same as she had earlier been given by Roscommon-Galway TD Martin Daly.
Ms Connolly said she was “not that vitriolic a person, you know, it wasn’t a moment of anger, it was a moment of frustration and it’s a frustration that a lot of people out there have said to me is a frustration with the growing dichotomy between the east and west of this country”.
She said it was clear the country was going to have more storms of an equal magnitude. “Somebody is going to die,” she said.
“I was asking Mr Martin please can we start having some innovative long-term thinking.”
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