A VILLAGE SUPERMARKET in east Co Galway made its way though almost a month’s worth of fuel oil the past week, as it fired up generators to open its doors to “queues down the road” of customers, in a region badly affected by power outages.

With so many households without power, McCormicks’ Mace store became a go-to for locals for food and other supplies – but the outages meant its owners had to resort to old fashioned methods to feed the masses.

“We were afraid we wouldn’t get the ovens to work with the storm, so my father Tony spent six hours one morning frying rashers for the deli,” said Barry McCormick.

“We went through an extraordinary amount of food.”

Tony opened the store in 1987 and this past week was likely the busiest it has ever seen.

The shop has been helping to heat babies’ bottles, as well as serving hot food. It has also supplied fuel oil to customers for their own generators and chainsaws, to deal with fallen trees.

“We remained open with the generators,” said manager Ciarán Bracken. “But there were queues out the door, there were queues down the road. There were people coming from 20 miles to get fed at one point.

“We did struggle for milk and products – everybody was hungry. We pretty much fed the parish and every person here.

One shop in the east Galway area had to resort to signage asking customers to obey ‘quotas’ for the number of cartons of milk that could be bought.

While such rationing was not in place at McCormicks, Bracken said the past week saw “incredible” pressure on supermarkets and shops in the wider region in terms of coping with demand.

A sign rationing milk in another Co Galway supermarket.

McCormick and Bracken paid tribute to other local businesses who donated goods such as milk, coffee beans and hot food for the deli to replenish the supermarket’s stock.

“We all looked out for each other in one way or another,” Barry said.

The storm resulted in extraordinary disruption to many businesses across the west of the country. At its peak over two million mobile customers – 35% of the total – experienced some level of disruption according to figures released by the government this week.

It also saw 281,000 fixed broadband customers, 10% of the total, completely without services.

One of the ways the power outages affected McCormicks was by knocking out their credit card machines for payment, something many customers only discovered as they walked through its doors.

“You have to put your faith in people, hoping they pay you back – but you have to do that in this type of situation I think and just trust people,” Barry said.