Farm Safety Week – Day One – Falls

Themed help and advice will be placed online each day of the fourth annual Farm Safety Week. The five daily themes are falls, machinery, livestock, transport, and children on farms.

Falls

The Farm Safety Week campaign today focusses on falls, which caused of one-fifth of fatal accidents on Irish farms in 2015.

Even the most safety conscious farmers can experience the effects of a serious injury as we learn from Dermot Hogan, a young farmer from County Offaly.

In a recent series of video clips entitled ‘What’s left behind’, developed by Embrace FARM (a support network in Ireland for those affected by fatal and serious accidents), Dermot’s tragic farm accident is described. Dermot was killed when he fell a relatively short distance through the roof of a shed he was painting and suffered serious head injuries.

The 45-year-old father-of-three was painting the shed at his farm when he fell through a perspex roof light and suffered fatal head injuries. His wife raised the alarm and contacted emergency services who rushed to the scene. Paramedics worked to save him but sadly he was later pronounced dead.

According to his brother Eugene, a respected journalist who was involved in developing the video clip to warn others said, “What happened to Dermot didn’t just take his life…it took away a bit of the rest of us.”

This case reinforces that fact that farm workers of any age run the risk of injury or death from falls.