Leiria, Portugal, Feb. 20, 2026 (Lusa) - A group of 70 Irish people have been helping to restore the power grid in Leiria. Their arrival in villages is sometimes so celebrated that some feel like American soldiers arriving in liberated France.
The group of workers belongs to ESB, the Irish public energy company, and subcontractors, who asked their employees to volunteer to work in Portugal ‘to help with storm repairs,’ Cormac Kerry, who works in Wexford, told the Lusa news agency.
The workers travelled by boat to Cherbourg (France) or Bilbao (Spain), then by road to Fátima, where they have been staying for two weeks.
‘It took two or three days to get here, and then it will take another three days to get back. In total, it was a week of travelling and two weeks of work,’ which ends today at the end of the day, says Cormac, wearing a white helmet, as he takes a break before returning to work in a rural area of Leiria.
Work starts early with a briefing and ends when the sun goes down: ‘Sometimes we stay a little while after dark to finish the job,’ he adds, noting that each team handles an average of two locations per day.
Cormac, who has been in other natural disaster situations, had never seen anything ‘on this scale’.
In his interactions with residents, the young Irishman praises the patience of those who have been without power for more than three weeks.
‘People are very patient. I've never seen people like this who haven't had electricity for three weeks and are so, so patient,’ he notes.
Despite working in the poorest areas of the region, where many of the people they meet ‘don't have much money’, there is always room for ‘coffee, biscuits, bread and even Port wine’.
‘They are very generous, and many are quite moved when they see us,’ Cormac Kerry tells Lusa.
At his side, Tom Cavanagh says the work has been ‘very rewarding’.
‘When we do our job, and the lights come back on, people are overwhelmed with emotion. The other day, a lady was crying as she hugged us all,’ he says.
‘This sometimes reminds me of those war films, when the Americans arrive in liberated France, and people come out to see who is passing by and say: “Oh, thank God you are here. We have been liberated”. Sometimes, here, I feel like that,’ acknowledged Tom, who soon said goodbye to Lusa to return to work.
Patrick Fleming, from Kildare, also notes that everyone is happy when they arrive in another village.
‘They've been without power for so lon,g and we're very pleased to come and very pleased to help and lend a hand,’ he said.
Dennis Dullea, who heads that ESB team, says that the main difficulty over the past two weeks has been adapting to a different network with different rules, but he pointed out that e-Redes employees have been ‘very good at getting things going.’
Even this Irishman from West Cork had never seen such widespread destruction of the network as he found in Leiria, having already been involved in a disaster response in France.
‘Here, it's everywhere, all over the place,’ he notes.
Cormac Kerry, despite enjoying helping out. as a kind of ‘spark of hope’ going from village to village, acknowledged some sadness at saying goodbye.
‘We're leaving, but this will continue for a long time. There is much more work to be done, and we would like to continue, but we have a lot to do in Ireland, and we have given everything we could here.’
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