Hundreds of families in north Dublin were thrown into darkness on St Stephen's Day when the areas of Malahide, Kinsealy and Swords suffered an electricity power outage.

Westlife's Nicky Byrne and his family, along with Boyzone's Ronan Keating, were among those who were without electricity for several hours on the day after Christmas.

The crooners all live in mansions in 'millionaires' row' in Abington, Malahide, and Nicky Byrne wrote on his Twitter page that he was settling in for a cosy evening with his wife Georgina when the electricity was suddenly knocked off.

"Right was watching the holiday on TV with G and bang! Electricity gone!" he wrote. "Call the ESB and there is a major fault in our area."

Cllr Eoghan O'Brien (Fianna Fail) said that it was not an isolated incident for the area.

"This is the sixth or seventh outage in the last few months," he said. "It seems as if one particular grid is experiencing difficulties.

"It's one thing dealing with it throughout the year, but when it happens around Christmas it's not good," he added.

"People were particularly concerned that this would be sorted before Christmas."

Cllr O'Brien said that the power was gone for a couple of hours on Stephen's Day in the late afternoon and then again on Monday.

"This has been going on for the last couple of months. It varies from a couple of hours up to six hours," he said.

The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) has told Cllr O'Brien that they are putting "enormous resources" into dealing with the problem and finding out the source of the problem.

"The ESB keep coming back and saying that the problem is sorted, but then it goes again," he said. "They said that they have replaced the faulty cables but it seems as if they haven't gotten to the bottom of this problem yet."

When there were problems with the network last month, cull crews were out throughout the night and the following day replacing the faulty equipment and patrolling the lines to identify any other vulnerabilities.

The ESB said that it apologies sincerely for the inconvenience caused to customers and stressed that it is employing all its technical staff in a major effort to resolve these problems.

Cllr O'Brien said that he will be following up with the ESB to finally fix the problem.

claire.murphy@herald.ie

- Claire Murphy