Shane McEntee (Meath East, Fine Gael)

I thank the Senator for raising this important issue which I also consider important. I attended the national farm safety conference open day in Ballincollig three weeks ago to address the issue of farm safety and yesterday I spent an hour and a half with a man from my county who is doing a masters degree specifically on farm safety. The Senator has touched on many issues with which I agree. Farming will grow and there will be fatalities if action is not taken. The more times the issue is raised in the House and elsewhere the more lives will be saved.

In regard to road accident deaths, I was involved in road safety but we left it too late to take action. There was a massacre on the roads every weekend because of the volume of people travelling to and from work as well as those who were out and about. Many lives were lost because we did not deal with the issue on time. I pay tribute to the former Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Mr. Noel Dempsey, who took the bull by the horns, as well as Gay Byrne and Noel Brett. There were two ways of dealing with the issue, as stated by the Senator, one was through awareness but the second, and most important, was enforcement of the law. That is where the Health and Safety Authority which carries out 3,000 inspections each year comes into play. The number of inspections has increased. I spent four years working on road safety where everybody worked as a team. The position will be worse on farms if we ignore the awareness issue.

Since coming into office, the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, and I have acknowledged the importance of farm safety at all opportunities. All farm accidents and fatalities are tragic and devastating for the families involved and for the wider farming and social communities. It is even more tragic when many of these accidents on farms involve the younger and older people in our communities. It is a fact that children and elderly people are more vulnerable to farm accidents than any other age group.

It is also a fact that farming is the most dangerous occupation in the country with more people killed on farms than in all other workplaces combined. To a large degree the nature of a farm is at the core of the problem. A farm is, to a great extent, seen first and foremost as a family home. It is therefore seen as a place of security and welcome for family, friends, neighbours and visitors.

However, a farmyard is a very dangerous place of work with large modern machinery and other dangers such as animals and extensive slurry storage areas. Last year alone there were 6,673 non-fatal accidents reported on farms in addition to 22 fatalities. The difficulty is to marry the family home part of the farm with the very dangerous farmyard and other dangerous areas of the extended farm. The Health and Safety Authority, HSA, under the remit of my colleague, the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Richard Bruton, has primary responsibility for health and safety in the workplace. The HSA is also the enforcement agency for workplace safety.

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is represented on the farm safety partnership advisory committee which is a sub-committee of the Health and Safety Authority. The committee advises the board on the direction the HSA should take on farm safety. The end of this year will see the culmination of the Farm Safety Action Plan 2009-2012 which has been the main focus of the farm safety partnership advisory committee and the organisations involved in the past three years.

Many measures are being taken to raise awareness of this serious problem. The Department included a farm safety message with the single payment application packs that were sent to more than 130,000 farmers in March of this year. This was a joint initiative between the Department, the Health and Safety Authority and the Farm Safety Partnership Committee. It is just one example of co-operation between various agencies to remind farmers of the importance of farming safety awareness and the potentially fatal consequences for them, their families and other farm visitors of lowering their guard.

I recently launched the farm and countryside safety project, which is located in the Family Farm at Dublin Zoo. It is supported by Agri Aware in conjunction with FBD Insurance, the IFA and ESB Networks. This programme will help to educate children about farm safety, one of the groups most at risk on farms today. As the Senator said we must start with young people. The project will culminate with the production of a 2013 calendar featuring selected images of safety messages drawn or painted by children. The calendar will be sent to all primary schools in the country.

Last month I spoke at the national farm safety conference in Ballincollig, County Cork, which is a focal point in the health and safety calendar and serves to highlight the importance of farm safety. My Department also has a dedicated area on the Department's website outlining the requirements on farm safety and practical advice on safety on farms.

Members may have also seen the advertisements on television recently where farmers who have been seriously injured in accidents gave an account of their experiences and showed their injuries. The Health and Safety Authority, which produced these advertisements, has also incorporated six testimonials from farmers in a thought-provoking DVD which is being used in all training undertaken by my Department and is available for download from the HSA website. This DVD was shown on television channels in marts around the country in the spring and will be repeated in the autumn. Farm safety is one of the most important issues facing farm families today.

The Health and Safety Authority will carry out 3,000 farm safety visits this year. These visits are aimed at advising and educating farmers of the dangers that are ever present in the farm environment. There is no single solution to this problem. All relevant agencies should, and I am confident are, and will, work with the Health and Safety Authority and the farming representative organisations to continue to tackle the issue. This is a good time to be a farmer. We want to do everything we can to get individual farmers to take care of their safety, their family's safety and the safety of all others who visit their farms. The information is out there, but we must keep working to get individual farmers to take notice and to put into practice good safety procedures and routines at all times.