Hot meals on icy slopes prove to be rural life-saver

Whether it’s bread, milk or coal, a small army braves the elements to deliver to the isolated

AT 81, and having had both hips replaced twice, Murtagh Corcoran is not venturing too far from his front door until he sees a good thaw.

Corcoran lives in the townland of Dromore in Kilmactranny, Co Sligo. “Dromore means ‘high hill’,” he points out, and with a blanket of snow still on the ground on top of a sheet of ice, his home yesterday was practically inaccessible.

He was not expecting any callers. But since the cold spell began, staff from Clasp, a community development agency in the Lough Arrow area, have been borrowing 4x4s to continue delivering hot meals daily to up to 90 clients, many of whom are elderly and living alone.

“People have been ringing us if they run out of bread or milk or coal,” explains supervisor Tom Sweeney, who also gave a lift yesterday to public health nurses checking on two newborn babies in the area.

In the early afternoon, he drove up past the festive, snow-flecked fir trees to the tip of Dromore to bring Corcoran his dinner. “They had come in the van yesterday but it got stuck and I wasn’t expecting anyone today but it was lovely to see them,” says Corcoran, who still drives when weather permits.

With roads throughout the northwest still treacherous, an army of determined workers have been borrowing four-wheel vehicles to make sure no one is left isolated.

Every morning since the cold spell started, Seán Owens and his colleagues on Banada Development Agency start the day by ringing up to 30 neighbours, many of them elderly men living alone on the slopes of the Ox mountains in Co Sligo, to check on them.

Yesterday morning, after 15 days of sub-zero temperatures, with the compacted ice up to six inches deep on many of the mountain roads, agency members set off in four-wheel drives to deliver over 30 hot meals to people living around the perimeter of the mountain.

One house on a slope known as Mass Hill was so high that even a 4x4 could not make the final leg of the journey and a local home help walked the last half mile, carrying a hot dinner for a man with no hope of getting to the shops himself.

“A lot of people simply would not survive without these services,” says Owens. “Some people would not be able to hold out, the constant contact is literally a life-saver.”

Bus driver John Queenan, who also operates a service for the Sligo rural transport scheme, got his usual complement to attend Mass in the village of Easkey on Saturday evening, in spite of the severe conditions.

“Some old people will go without food but are determined to get to Mass and won’t go without the envelope for the priest,” he says. “One woman was so cold when I called to the house that I had to help her get her coat on.”

Queenan has to reverse his minibus the last quarter-mile to access the house of another of his regulars, 81-year-old Muriel Leonard, who lives alone on a mountain slope.

“There are drains on either side and if you blink, down you go,” he says, having been out dropping groceries to people who could not venture out.

“I live a mile from the nearest shop and, only for John and a neighbour who passes my house when he feeds his cattle, I don’t know what I would do,” says Muriel, adding there is still a sheet of ice outside her front door at Griddle Culleens.

Retired nurse Katie Sweeney also lives alone on the edge of the Atlantic in Co Sligo.

“I am over 80 years old. I had heart surgery 12 years ago, and I am four miles from the nearest shop but I am very, very lucky because I have good neighbours,” she says.

In the past, she fractured both hands in falls. “The bus driver John Queenan rings me every day to see what I need,” she says, pointing out she could not manage on her own without the kindness of such people. With a smile, she adds: “I never married – someone had a lucky escape – so I have to fend for myself.”