Mr. Brian Rohan:

I applied for a TAMS grant and had to complete a half-day training course. The Health and Safety Authority has indicated that, in many cases, the farmer's wife is sent to complete the course and tick that box because the farmer is too busy to spend the half day doing the training, although I completed the half-day training myself because I wanted to see what goes on at these training courses. The Health and Safety Authority has trained people in State bodies to conduct these training courses but what I witnessed that day was horrendous. We were shown a picture of a tractor that had been overturned, with blood on the yard, and the man asked what we thought of it. He said an 80-year-old man with a tractor had lifted the loader too high, gone down a rough lane, turned over and was killed. We were told also about a farmer who had brought his five-year-old son onto the yard and asked whether it would be okay for him to be left loose on the yard while the father was feeding the cattle.

I lost my own dad. Thankfully for me, he did not die at home and got to the hospital, but there are many families where the father was driving a tractor that drove over his son, or where a son was with the father who was attacked by a cow. There has to be a better way to do this training than by showing these pictures. Survivors or people who have lost somebody and gone through an accident can deliver the training much better than some of these training professionals. We have to think of the people who have been affected. No questions were asked about whether anybody in attendance had lost anybody in a farm accident or had suffered a farm accident. It was just a matter of doing the two or three hours' training that day and some of the stuff was horrendous.