Comment: Road accidents dominate our news headlines and curbing poor driver behaviour is a major political issue. The Irish Times was right to devote two pages to the tragic bus crash in Co Offaly this week. Yet incidents in the Irish workplace which resulted in over 70 reported fatalities and thousands of injuries, some quite serious, last year did not merit the same level of media coverage.
A serious workplace accident impacts on the victim in a most obvious way but it can also affect production or service quality, team morale, the image of the company and insurance premiums.
In many boardrooms and for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), health and safety is said to be an important issue, but has tended not to feature as a specific item for discussion. In very few cases, for instance, does health and safety performance feature when a manager or employee's salary or bonus is being calculated. How often is your firm's health and safety statement consulted by every manager and worker?
In social partnership and industrial relations discussions taking place at present, the focus is on allegations of displacement of Irish workers and the privatisation of Aer Lingus, yet the ongoing scandal of death and injury from inadequate health and safety standards are rarely mentioned. The fact that there were more workplace fatalities last year than in 2004 should have set alarm bells ringing for Government and others.
An awareness among all involved in the health and safety sector of the need to address the issues contributing to these incidents led to new legislation last year, the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act. It will lead to further regulations to ensure safe work practices and an even tougher approach to enforcement by the Health and Safety Authority (HSA).
It has also forced the National Irish Safety Organisation (Niso), as the main provider of training and support to companies and organisations in the field of health and safety, to reassess its role and develop a more focused approach.
Health and safety must not be viewed as "over-regulation" of business. We need organisations to view it as an aid to success not as an additional cost. With this in mind, we fundamentally reviewed the service we provide.
When set up in 1963, Niso was one of the original models of social partnership and remains so, with representatives from Ictu, Ibec, HSA and the Insurance Industry Federation on the executive.
Like so many essentially voluntary organisations established during the 1960s and 1970s, many of the concerns of the early days have now been addressed through regulation rather than a code of good practice. The focus for Niso has progressively shifted towards high-quality training to meet new health and safety requirements.
To deal with these changing demands and the growing number of requests from the 1,700 companies and organisations in membership, Niso decided to undergo a fundamental review in 2005 and commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers to prepare a strategy for the way forward.
A no-holds barred report is now being implemented with a doubling of staff numbers to professionalise the service, including the appointment of three senior team members to enhance and grow supports to members - one dealing with training, one managing up-to-date health and safety advice and one charged with developing and promoting the organisation.
Niso realised this was necessary, primarily because we have found that the statutory requirements for companies in this field are growing and being enforced more rigorously and that, thankfully, there is a greater emphasis on health and safety in some companies.
Reducing workplace injuries will keep insurance premiums in check, so there is a solid economic rationale for addressing concerns.
The integration of health and safety training into the national qualifications framework is a key objective of Niso and we believe that every employee and manager in Ireland should undergo some formal recognised training in basic health and safety issues when they start in a position of employment.
We expect those starting to drive to know the rules of the road, but in most firms there is no obligation to have a basic knowledge of how to ensure a safe workplace when someone starts a job.
Our record on occupational health and safety in the Republic has improved but there is still tolerance in some areas of risky work practices. We have to go much further to ensure that our construction sites, offices, farms and shop floors are safe places to work.
That challenge is being addressed by Niso in terms of the range of new services on offer, but only when we truly regard health and safety as the top priority can real change be achieved and workplace-based accidents be significantly reduced.
When every boardroom and organisation agenda has a specific item on health and safety, when every work team member is continuously trained in the area and when the first question at social partnership talks is "how can we make our workplaces safer?", then we know that health and safety is taken seriously in Ireland.
John O'Shaughnessy is incoming president of the National Irish Safety Organisation.
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