Is Eir being fair?

So, like many people we are without internet since Storm Eowyn. I called Eir, who logged the incident with NBI and an engineer was sent out on Monday to review. Engineer said lines are down but there is a wider network issue (even if he repairs the wires, there is no signal coming into the box down the road) so he has to wait until network is fixed before repairing the cable. There is no timeline for this, so I phone Eir customer service today to see if I'll still be charged while we have no internet. Apparently, the storm was an "act of god" and they are allowed to charge the full rate because it's in the small print. If we had had an outage from the last big storm (Daire) we would have been entitled to some sort of refund. They couldn't really explain the difference between the two storms other than Eowyn caused nationwide outages.

Anyway, my next question was how much will it cost me to exit my contract and go with another provider (I had been considering this anyway due to constant price hikes by Eir). To get out of the contract, due to end in August, will cost me over 600 euro!!! I have to buy it out at 3 euro per day!

So, not only am I paying for no internet for god knows how much longer, it will cost me an arm and a leg to change provider once the service is restored!

I think this seems very unreasonable and feels like there should be some sort of consumer protection in place to stop this sort of thing from happening.

Anyone else in the same boat?