Farm Safety Week: trying to get farmers out of a vicious circle

Farming remains the most dangerous workplace in Ireland, with 15 fatalities occurring on Irish farms to date this year. Twelve farm fatalities have occurred in the Republic of Ireland and three in Northern Ireland – this does not include the death of a woman on a Galway farm earlier this week.

Last year, 24 people lost their lives in the Republic of Ireland and seven people lost their lives in Northern Ireland.

Research indicates that, in general, farmers’ attitudes to safety only change after serious injury occurs. The level of farm accidents is not decreasing, the HSA has said.

Despite only a small proportion of the workforce being employed in farming, a large proportion of all fatal workplace accidents occur in agriculture.

The majority of farm fatalities this year have involved machinery.

Northern Ireland has seen three people lose their lives on farms this year, with livestock being the main element involved in deaths in the North.

Eight of the 12 deaths in the Republic of Ireland this year were farmers aged 60 or over, with the old and the young being exceptionally vulnerable to death and injury on Irish farms.

“Your health, your safety, your choice” is the message of this year’s Farm Safety Week, led by the IFA.

Rather than focusing on agriculture’s poor safety record and stories of things going wrong, the campaign this year highlights stories of when things go right, sharing good practices and demonstrating what “good safety” looks like.

Commenting on the initiative, IFA president Joe Healy said that the “statistics don’t tell the whole story – they don’t tell you the impact a farm accident can have on the rest of your life, on your ability to run the farm”.

This year, the IFA is appointing a farm health and safety executive to implement a pilot farmer-to-farmer peer learning initiative at branch level, to advise farmers about potential risks and educate them to become safety ambassadors within their communities.