Mr. Martin O'Halloran:

We have been examining the cost and the impact of fatalities and serious injuries on both the individual organisations and the economy. It is quite striking. The report on compliance was done by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation.

The original report was commissioned by the then Minister of State, Tony Killeen, following the implementation of the 2005 Act. He gave an undertaking to the Houses of the Oireachtas during the passage of the Act. The report was done by Indecon. It estimated that the economic cost of failures was in the region of 2.1% of GNP. The report also studied a number of costs to the economy and to business. A later analysis was based on the BeSMART tool. It was estimated that the savings to business based on a departmental analysis using a standardised cost model was in excess of €40 million as a result of a reduction in the regulatory burden. We have received testimonials from individual small firms who quote savings between €500 and €1,000 from the use of this tool. The feedback continues to be very positive. The area of accident costing is very difficult. A number of studies have been carried out in Ireland and internationally, the earliest of which dates from a study by Andreotti in the ILO in the 1980s.

The feedback on BeSMART is very positive. If an inspector visits a site and finds that the client or the employer is using BeSMART, the inspection will be quick and quite cursory.

We also developed a code of practice for agriculture that is widely used. We do a great deal of work online. Mr. Horgan mentioned our website, from which information is downloaded more than 700,000 times each year and which receives millions of hits. We are also using social media to get the message out. In terms of the education section, for example, 45,000 transition year students have passed through education programmes and we provide a great deal of online learning. We are hoping to inculcate a culture so that when youngsters enter the workplace, they understand their fundamental human rights and know how to ask appropriately that these been observed.