Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 May 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Role and Operation of the Health and Safety Authority: Discussion

9:30 am

Mr. Conor O'Brien:

Regarding the inspection regime, we work as much in the influence and promote space as we do in the regulate space. Yes, we are looking for compliance with the regulations in the inspections but, as I said earlier, in some of the other sectors we are doing an awful lot of work with the farmers to try to help them in respect of improvements that can be made on things we see as we are going through our visits, for instance, the livestock crush. We may have seen better ways of structuring or of running those facilities while out on other inspections and we will give that information to the farmer while we are there. An awful lot of what we do in the inspection itself is related to helping and influencing. Even outside of the inspection regime, we do a huge amount of work through the farm safety partnership advisory committee and through all of the various codes of practice, guidelines and checklists that we issue. We also do a lot of training through the HSE portal for online learning. We have a very good tool for helping the farmer to build a safety statement on risk assessment. I have gone through it myself to see what it is like and it is very easy to use. Inspection is only a small part of what we do. It is the macro of everything we do here that helps.