Workplace deaths - Farm safety must always improve

EVERY year around this time, the Health and Safety Authority publishes Ireland’s annual toll of death in the workplace.

Behind the chilling statistics there are harrowing stories of human tragedies, lost lives and families ruined.

Year after year, editorials appear in these columns in the hope that farmers and other workers engaged in dangerous livelihoods might become more conscious of the hazards that surround their lives. And yet, possibly in a sense of psychological self-deception, the reaction is perhaps best summed up in the mantra that such an eventuality “could never happen to me”. However, in a moment of tiredness or over-familiarity with some aspect of the job, the unbearable accident happens.