Mr. Pat Griffin:

I thank the Chairman and members for the opportunity to speak. In relation to our inspection process, we have limited resources for the inspection of workplaces across the country. However, we have maintained a huge level of inspection relative to other sectors within the agriculture sector. We plan to inspect 2,300 farms across the country this year.

This represents giving 25% of our inspection resource to a sector employing 6%, so we give the agricultural sector quite an element of our inspection resource. With regard to how they are selected, we look at the trends throughout the country and the chart on death black spots which we developed with Teagasc and which was included with our submission. It shows pockets where there are significantly higher levels of farm deaths. We focus on high-risk areas first, and we also consider where there is expansion and movement and try to focus on this. With regard to carrying out the selection process, we do not have a full database of all farmers in the country. Inspectors are given counties to look after and they will decide to go out on inspection for a week or two. They look for progressive farms, farms where it seems much work is being done, and bigger farms.

The process is non-confrontational. We agreed with the farming organisations to rename our farm safety inspections as farm safety visits to show that we are not confrontational and that we want to be there to help farmers. All our inspectors are asked to be a help in the first instance and to provide guidance and reassurance to farmers and help them in what they do to protect their families and themselves from risk. The general feedback from all of our inspections is very positive, and this morning Mr. Eddie Downey recounted his positive experience of inspection, but we do find situations where something on a farm can be wrong. Farmers can be found to be operating a machine without a PTO guard, or there can be open slurry tanks. In such cases of clear and visible breaches we issue an enforcement notice in the form of an improvement notice and give the farmers a certain period of time to fix the problem. Generally, we do not have issues. We have regulated the agricultural sector for 20 years, and within this period we have had seven or eight prosecutions, which were generally on foot of asking the farmers in question two or three times to make a certain repair job on machinery or change a certain process. We have not used much of the stick. Normally the follow-up process involves issuing written advice to the farmer listing the primary issues that need to be fixed. We do not normally require a repeat visit, but if an improvement or prohibition notice has been issued we do return to the farm to see that the issues have been put right. Four years ago we increased farm inspections by almost 100%, from 1,500 to 3,000 per year, and maintained this rate of inspection until this year, when we decided to reduce the level of inspection to 2,300 to facilitate getting involved with discussion groups.

We certainly do not have the answers, and this is a huge problem throughout the world. According to figures for ten EU member states in 2007, the death rate throughout Europe was 12 per 100,000 employed in the sector, but since then no figures on which we can rely have been produced. We can be told how many calves will be born in Europe this year but not how many farmers will be killed. I estimate 1,000 farmers in Europe are killed every year. We work with other organisations to deal with this issue. We work closely with Teagasc and examine the research it does. It has found the discussion group model has been hugely beneficial with regard to farmers taking on new technology and developing. We wanted to see if we could track the use of discussion groups to get this culture change, particularly in the high-risk areas that farmers need to change. This year we will get involved with 50 discussion groups as a pilot. We have also been in discussions with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine on the knowledge transfer groups which will be formed later this year. We have made a submission to make health and safety a mandatory element of the discussion group model.