30.05.2006

Fatal accidents up over 50% in Ireland

The Irish health &Safety Authority has published its 2005 annual report. The number of fatal accidents in Construction, Farming, quarrying and mining were all well up on 2005 levels.

23 employees died in the construction sector, up from 15 in 2004 and 20 in 2003. However the number of non fatal accidents dropped by over four percent in the same period.

The Irish authority increased it s number of inspection by 23 percent, to 6,023 with only 8 percent resulting from an accident.

One of the authority’s largest campaigns targeted work at height, while another looked into mobile site traffic. In spite of these extra inspections, Construction overtook farming to claim almost a third of all work related deaths.

Construction employs around 300,000 people in Ireland, an increasing number of them from Eastern Europe. In order to help cope with this influx, the Health and &Safety authority publishes an increasing range of material in Polish and other central European languages. .