John Cregan (Limerick West, Fianna Fail)

——but we need to ensure that we have the necessary personnel in place. We need to increase the numbers of such personnel to ensure that workplace deaths are kept at a minimum. Safety at work is paramount, so it is most disquieting to see the workplace fatality statistics that have emerged in recent years. The Act is a serious wake-up call to employers who do not do enough to prevent accidents in their places of employment.

Workers also have a duty not to endanger themselves or others and to be alert to dangerous situations. The Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005 marks a new era in workplace health and safety because it sets out to shift the focus away from viewing health and safety as an add-on. Health and safety must be integrated into a management system that involves workers and employers acting together to achieve a safer and healthier working environment. The issue is about the behaviour of both workers and employers combined and backed up by enforcement.

Unfortunately we rely perhaps too much on enforcement. As a smoker I sometimes smile to myself when, after all the hullabaloo about the introduction of the smoking ban, we smokers were found to be very compliant people in observing a law that is self-policing. If every other law here was similarly observed, we would not need enforcement. However, unfortunately, in every walk of life no matter whether we are talking about roads or building sites, we need enforcement because people choose to be negligent and careless. Some people are not prepared to——

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