Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

I agree with everything the Deputy said with perhaps one exception. I do not believe we need to go down the route of sending files to the DPP. I should have stated at the outset that some people listening to this debate may have lost a brother, a father or a child this year or last year and these are scars that will last a lifetime. We need to be conscious of this when we speak about statistics; it is far too crude a way to speak about people's lives and the tragic stories of so many of our farming families who have suffered fatalities. This is about trying to force a change in attitude rather than trying to impose legislation on families after something has occurred.

However, the Deputy is correct that there is under-reporting of accidents in the fishing and farming communities. We know this and it needs to change. Often, people on farms, whether a 16-year-old driving a tractor pulling 30 tonnes of grain through a field or into a yard or someone feeding a suckler herd with a bull in the field, do not consider themselves to be in a workplace as such. Serious dangers are attached to a farming lifestyle and workplace. We are not making an adequate impression on changing attitudes towards this threat to people's health and lives. We need to work much harder on this. The tools the Department is using include introducing a farm safety element to REPS training courses and to the dairy efficiency programme, which involves dairy farmers meeting in groups up to 8 times a year. Most fatalities happen in the dairy sector although there are only 17,000 dairy farms out of 130,000 farm families. We need to target this.

We should not go down the route of trying to introduce more legislation and blunt enforcement through farm inspections. Although this is necessary, ultimately it will not change an attitude which needs to be changed in the farming and fishing communities.

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