The country’s workplace safety agency says it currently does not have sufficient resources to perform all of its duties to the highest standard, the organisation’s chief executive has said.
Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week programme, Martin O’Halloran, CEO of the Health and Safety Authority (HSA), said he has written to the Government looking for additional personnel to meet the demands of a growing national workforce.
The agriculture sector is by far the single most dangerous place to work and each year farm fatalities account for between 30-50% of all workplace deaths, while farms make up just 6% of workplaces.
Over the past decade, 200 people have died on Irish farms. Despite this, the number of farm inspections carried out by the HSA has fallen from 3,112 to just over 2,000 between 2012 and last year.
Mr O'Halloran said the HSA was stripped of resources around the time of the recession but needed those back, now that employment levels had surged again across various sectors.
"Like many state organisations we had a very significant reduction in our resources. It was about 27%. We were able to work around that up to a certain period but we are now back economically to being almost at peak employment.
"Peak employment took place in 2007 when around 2.1 million people were in employment. We’re now at 2.69 or thereabouts million in employment so we’re as close as almost makes no difference to being back at peak employment. Unfortunately we’re not resourced to match that level," Mr O’Halloran said.
"Construction is growing rapidly. Agriculture, with the abolition of the milk quota, has become somewhat more intense in the dairy sector and that is the higher risk subset of agriculture," Mr O’Halloran said.
"What I can say is that I have made some proposals to the board [of the HSA] and the minister. We’re hoping that our submissions to redress the resources issue will be acted on," Mr O’Halloran said.
"We have carried out a very objective evidence-based analysis and we developed a workforce plan in which we estimate that the number of people we would require in the organisation over and above what we have at the moment to deliver our mandate to appropriate quality standard would be about 50 more people," Mr O’Halloran said.
Outlining why he felt it was important to have the correct number of inspectors and support staff, he said: "While we cannot have an inspector at every farm gate or at every business we do believe that, based on the findings of an ESRI report [published in May of this year], that it is a very important driver of behaviour not only on farms but on every business."
However, the Minister with responsibility for workplace safety, Minister of State at the Department of Enterprise Pat Breen, would not state specifically whether he could guarantee that the HSA would get the full complement of extra staff it says it needs.
"It’s not all about resources. Resources are important but it’s not all about resources," Minister Breen said.
He said the HSA were hiring 11 people under a recruitment drive but added that "it’s not all about inspections".
Mr Breen said that while resources and inspections had their place, that "working together and collaboration was also important", with reference to what he called a "round-table" which he said he had held on the subject of farm safety between his department and other stakeholders and farm organisations. He said he had asked them for submissions on the subject.
However, the chairman of the Farm Safety Partnership, former UCD Dean of Agriculture Professor James Phelan, said that one of the problems was the lack of government spending on farm safety, with the bulk of the important work being left in the hands of voluntary bodies and farming associations such as Embrace, the IFA, Macra and others, he said.
"We haven’t got a really, really supported scheme going here on the issue," Professor Phelan said.
Speaking on the This Week programme, the father of a young man who died on the family farm in Wexford earlier this year outlined the pain and trauma of his son’s death, and how it had affected him and his family.
John Kennedy died earlier this year in an accident after he came off a motorised quad bike when out herding cows for milking.
His father Donal Kennedy said the impact on his family was enormous.
"It should never have to happen to parents or brothers or sisters. It’s something that is very hard to take," he said.
