'You could see people get more panicked' - Irish tourist reveals anxiety of Spain's power outage

Power was finally restored in Spain and Portugal on Tuesday morning following a major power outage across the two countries that impacted thousands of Irish people enjoying their holidays at the popular tourist destinations. 

Both countries were brought to a standstill by the unprecedented blackout, the cause of which is still being determined. 

For those on holiday in Spain and Portugal and even some parts of France, this of course was far from ideal.

On Tuesday morning's Oliver Callan Show on RTÉ Radio One, Marie Reilly from Dublin phoned Oliver to chat about her experience of the blackouts in Alicante, Spain. 

Marie said that they had no use of their mobile phones and that they were completely unaware the outage had happened right across the country.

She told Oliver: "My brother did manage very early to get a phone call through to us then everything went completely. We couldn't make any calls to or from."

Although the power returned for them at around half one in the morning, their phone coverage did not come back until they woke up this morning. 

A major thing for people on holiday is that ATMs were out of use. Marie noted that she was lucky because she had brought cash, however she saw many go to the ATMs but there was no way of accessing cash with the power gone. Everything was simply shut down.

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Marie said: "You could see people get more panicked and think what if this is going to be more than one day."

She added that at that point the anxiety started to kick in for many: "We started to hear it was Spain, Portugal, France and Italy as the Chinese Whispers had started at the stage."

Of course, other practical amenities were also out of use such as elevators. Marie said that they were on the fifth floor of their rented apartment block which was perfectly manageable for them. However, she pointed out: "One lady was in a wheelchair and we don't know if they were stuck in there. It was very hard."

The Dubliner did remark that she was luckier than some in little ways by simply having candles in her apartment which some people may not have had who were on holiday. 

She said: "We were very lucky because there were two candles left by the previous people in this rented apartment and we had just bought one of those lighters. We don't smoke and we didn't have a gas hob so we had no way of lighting the candles and we had just bought the lighter, so we could light the two candles. We were very lucky."