Summer safety: Summer is a particularly dangerous time on the farm. Harvesting and children are a deadly mix, while nine children have died in accidents on the land so far this year

Farms are uniquely dangerous workplaces because they combine the living area and the worksite, exposing an estimated 500,000 people in the State to farm risks.

This combination has contributed to an unacceptably high level of farm deaths over the years. Already there have been nine such deaths this year, two of them children.

It is the level of child deaths over the years which is causing most concern to the authorities both here and in Northern Ireland.

In the last six years, 41 children have died on farms on this island, according to a cross-Border survey published in June. Of these, 30 children lost their lives in accidents on farms in the Republic while 11 children lost their lives in the North.

Of the 41, 18 were under five years of age. Two of the three child deaths resulted from accidents involving machines, while drowning in slurry was the second most common cause.

This week, as he issued an appeal to farmers and visitor to farms to exercise great care during the peak holiday period, Mr Aidan McTiernan, senior inspector with the Health and Safety Authority, talked about the elements which make the farm such a dangerous place.

"Tractors and other machinery have been the cause of most of the deaths of children. Carrying children on tractors, tractors being reversed and children being driven over, are the main causes of death," he said.

"There is also, I believe, a new element on Irish farms. More and more farm couples are finding that one of them is working off the land and the other is the childminder. A farmer cannot be a tractor and machine operator and a childminder as well and this, I believe is a new trend on Irish farms," he said.

The nature of machinery was also important as tractors were getting larger and more high powered and in many cases the visibility from such machines was more limited than in the past. "I think this is something that machinery designers should be looking at. I believe the visibility levels from such machines is dropping," he said.

A major cause of tractor-related accidents, involving not only children but adults, was the maintenance of tractors. Uncovered power drive shafts and poor brakes had been a major contributory factor in many accidents.

Mr McTiernan said the Health and Safety Authority had estimated that 500,000 people, the 130,000 farmers and their families, faced farm risks daily. Children visiting farms were more at risk from slurry drowning than children reared on farms who were slightly more street wise about the problem. "Children going on farms should be accompanied and monitored at all times," he said.

There was a continuing danger to farmers and children from livestock, especially bulls which he described as "very dangerous" animals. "Since 1990 we have recorded that there have been 2.4 fatal accidents per year involving bulls and we have already had one such accident this year."

This involved a farmer who was removing a bull which was proving difficult to handle from his farm. Despite the fact he had help, the bull had killed the man.

"Bulls are particularly dangerous and here was a case of someone doing the correct thing and yet it ended up as a fatality," Mr McTiernan said.

Additional hazards have been created this year because of the wet weather which has delayed silage harvesting and compressed the time available for the harvest to be won.

The Farm Relief Services, which operates 22 offices and employs 3,000 contract farm operators, warned that farmers who were trying to make up for lost time, could create a greater potential for accidents this year.

Mr Jim Dockery, national health and safety officer with the organisation, warned against driving tractors at excessive speeds with heavy loads of grass on narrow roads.

Teagasc had carried out a survey of non fatal accidents in 1992 and found there were 5,000 such accidents. In 1997, this had dropped to 2000 but in the last survey, 1992, there were 3,500 accidents.

The involvement of the main farm organisations and Teagasc, the agriculture and food development authority with the Department of Agriculture, has helped keep the issue to the fore.