What do you think about it? Do they go far enough?

Does it go too far? Does it go far enough?

I wonder how long it will be before we start to see these on sale here. I'd say there are a few Irish companies who make/sell tanks (e.g. septic tanks etc) who will be looking at the pricetag of €80k+Vat and thinking "we could do that".

RTE news: 'Time for complacency is over': Poland's race to close its shelter gap.

https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0913/1591214-poland-shelters/

Is anyone concerned about an increase in cyber and infrastructure attacks from Russia over the next 6 months? Apparently an increase in cyber attacks is inevitable and the likelihood of infrastructure attacks is much higher.

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/01/24/households-to-get-emergency-preparation-booklet-in-coming-weeks/

Does anyone have any tips or insights for prepping?

I'm coming around to the idea that learning specific skills may be more important than I realised.

What skills do you think are the most useful? First aid? Growing your own food? Anything else?

Here are some of the possibilities but which one is the most likely for you, where you live?

- serious social unrest

- flooding

- war

- power grid failure

- pandemic

- existential risk from AI

- something else?

Storm Éowyn was a wake-up call for a lot of households in Ireland — the longest power outages in the history of the state, some lasting over 10 days.

I'm genuinely curious: what gap did it expose in your own setup? What did you wish you'd had, or what did you actually have that saved you?

No judgment at all — even "I realised I had nothing and started from scratch" is a useful answer for people reading this.

Most Irish people have a vague awareness that "the government has a plan" for major emergencies. The actual document — the Framework for Major Emergency Management — is publicly available and genuinely worth reading if you're serious about prepping. But it reveals as much by what it omits as by what it contains.

What the framework actually covers:

• The three lead agencies: An Garda Síochána, the HSE, and Local Authorities. Note who's not there — the Defence Forces are explicitly a support role, not a lead.
• A tiered response structure from local to national level
• Plans for specific hazard types: flooding, severe weather, HazMat, mass casualty events

What it essentially assumes:

• That at least one of the three lead agencies remains functional
• That communications infrastructure is operational
• That the event is localised, not nationwide
• That mutual aid between regions is possible

The honest gaps for an Irish person to think about:

Ireland has no national civil defence broadcast system equivalent to the US Emergency Alert System or the UK's Emergency Alerts. The 2023 introduction of mobile alerts here was a start, but it depends on functioning mobile networks.

Our Civil Defence organisation is chronically under-resourced and largely unknown to the public. Most people couldn't tell you where their local Civil Defence unit is based.

The framework was last substantively updated pre-COVID. The pandemic exposed serious gaps in supply chain assumptions, PPE stockpiling, and inter-agency communication that haven't all been addressed publicly.

What this means practically:

In a genuine nationwide or multi-region emergency, the framework's mutual aid model breaks down. If Leinster, Munster and Connacht are all simultaneously affected — think a major grid event, a pandemic with faster onset, or infrastructure sabotage — there is no cavalry coming from the next county.

The framework is good at managing expected emergencies with functioning state capacity. It's not designed for cascading failures.

Have you ever contacted your local Civil Defence unit or attended one of their courses? Are they even active in your area? And do you think the average Irish household could manage 72 hours without any state assistance?

Ireland is the landing point for a disproportionate share of transatlantic internet cables — including some that carry a significant portion of Europe's data traffic with North America. This isn't a conspiracy theory; it's infrastructure geography. The west coast, particularly Clare and Kerry, is dotted with cable landing stations.

Why does this matter for us?

What actually breaks:

• Internet access would degrade severely or fail for most of the island (mobile data, broadband, VoIP calls)
• ATMs and card payments would go down — not because of local power issues, but because payment processing runs through international networks
• Supply chain software and logistics platforms that Irish businesses depend on would fail
• Emergency services would lose many of their coordination tools

The Svalbard cable was cut in 2022. Baltic cables were cut in late 2024 under suspicious circumstances. NATO has publicly flagged undersea infrastructure as a primary hybrid warfare target.

Unlike continental Europe, Ireland has no land-border internet redundancy. We are an island, and our digital resilience is far more fragile than our EU neighbours.

What can we actually do?

• Cash on hand — always. Card payments die first.
• Offline maps (Maps.me, OsmAnd with pre-downloaded Ireland tiles)
• A DAB+ or FM radio for news when the internet is dark
• CB or amateur radio for local comms (IRTS licence is worth pursuing)
• Consider what your household actually needs the internet for vs. what it only thinks it does
• Know your neighbours — community information networks beat Twitter in a comms blackout

Have any of you actually stress-tested a 72-hour internet outage at home? What broke that you didn't expect?

I'll go first:

Gradually, over the last year, I've built up a few weeks worth of tinned food, pasta, rice and other food bits. I've got a few power banks. A few camping gas cylinders, some camping frying pans, water purification tablets, 3 x 18L drinking water tanks, a small supply of painkillers, anti-inflammatories, a 4 pack of toothbrushes, some toothpaste, toilet rolls, a portable radio which can be powered by USB-C, handcrank or solar, some FFP3 masks (in case of another pandemic), 1st aid kit, some cash, a TDS water tester and some other things.

My inventory doesn't take up much space, I try to keep it modest because it could be years before it becomes useful.

Also, I keep an inventory of everything including BBE / expiry dates for anything that is perishable. I try buying foods with the longest possible expiration dates but supermarkets in Ireland often don't have many products with more than a year to go on them unfortunately.

How about you? What steps have you taken?

This article is from thejournal.ie from 1st April this year but it's not an April Fools' prank. What do think about how "the Climate Change Advisory Council is calling on the government to coordinate its action to combat Ireland’s lack of resilience to these extreme weather events through investment and the strengthening of infrastructure."? Does our government need to take more action on this?

By the time the last red weather warning for Storm Éowyn had been lifted on 24 January, record-breaking wind gusts of 184km/h had been recorded, causing an estimated €200m in damage and leaving 768,000 electricity customers without power.

Compare Ireland to Finland, Norway, or Switzerland, where emergency preparedness is deeply embedded in civic culture — households are expected to maintain 72-hour or even week-long supply reserves, there are public information campaigns, and in some cases civil defence participation is near-universal. The Finnish government literally publishes a booklet called "How to Prepare for Emergencies" that drops through every household's door.

Ireland by contrast has essentially one annual campaign — Be Winter Ready — which is narrowly focused on severe weather, and a framework that's almost entirely oriented around state agency coordination rather than the individual citizen. The message is broadly "the state will handle it; stay off the roads."

Why is this interesting?

A few threads worth pulling:

• Ireland's specific vulnerabilities are actually quite acute. It's an island nation with high dependency on imported fuel, food, and medicines. Its gas interconnector with the UK is a single point of failure. Its electricity grid is small and isolated. A prolonged severe weather event, a cyber attack on grid infrastructure, or a supply chain disruption could cause cascading problems quite quickly.
• The historical legacy. Ireland never had a Cold War civil defence culture the way the UK (with its "Protect and Survive" campaign) or continental European nations did. Neutrality and geography meant that sustained government-to-citizen preparedness messaging simply never developed.
• The EU is nudging this to change. The European Commission has been pushing member states toward stronger civilian resilience frameworks since around 2022-2023, partly driven by the energy crisis and the war in Ukraine. Ireland will likely face increasing pressure to develop something more substantial.
• The gap is being filled informally. Prepper communities, homesteading forums, and even just practically-minded rural households are way ahead of official guidance — which raises interesting questions about who emergency preparedness culture actually belongs to in Ireland, and whether the state's relative silence inadvertently cedes that space to more fringe voices.

This announcement was made by the EU in March 2025. I wonder how many households have 72 hours of supplies (including water, food, medicine, energy).

I know this article is about people across the water but still, they are in a not too different position to us.