The founding director-general of the Health and Safety Authority (HSA), Mr Tom Walsh, will step down from his post in the next few weeks.
But he has lost none of his commitment to the purpose behind the authority. In an interview with The Irish Times, Mr Walsh remained critical, if diplomatically so, of the insurance industry. He also looked at the possible shape of future health and safety legislation and spoke of his grieving process in leaving the HSA.
Back in 1999, he criticised the insurance sector for not responding "to the repeated requests from the authority to co-operate in the transfer of summary information on civil claims handled by the insurance companies".
Asked if the insurance sector had yet responded to the HSA's repeated requests, he said: "I suppose the short answer is no". The long answer acknowledged a lot of goodwill and the "very competitive situation" in which insurance companies operate.
"More recent discussions with them earlier this year showed a greater willingness to talk to the membership with a view to coming up with data in a suitable anonymous form which could be passed to us. I'm hopeful that that will take place," he said.
Closing workplaces for serious breaches of health and safety law has proved to be effective in achieving compliance. "It's been so effective that companies now want to go down the voluntary closure route when a very serious situation is brought to their attention.
"The downside of that is that the impression could be given that perhaps we're not using Section 39 to the extent that representative bodies out there might wish us to do but, in fact, we get quite a number of voluntary closures."
He acknowledges that there's a genuine case for increasing the level of fines for workplace injuries but it's not something he wanted to "comment on too much given that the debate is going on in Government about amendments of the Act".
On the current review of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act, 1989, he judges that "fundamentally, the legislation is working quite well". He does not anticipate radical change but anticipates a strengthening of individual provisions.
When the HSA was set up, there were 1.2 million people at work. Now there are 1.7 million workers. Possibly only a half million of those now employed were at work when the 1989 Act came in. Up to a million current workers didn't get the message in the early 1990s. "So there's a case for re-launching health and safety again, I think, and how better than through a new piece of legislation."
In reviewing the Act, four or five other pieces of primary legislation need to be re-examined, such as legislation on dangerous substances, offshore, mines and quarries, and what remains of the old Factories Act. "We've already been stripping down the Safety in Industry cum Factories Act. It's clear to me anyway that we can strip it away completely and replace what is essential in it with new regulations under the upcoming new Act."
On older secondary legislation or regulations, he believes there's a case for looking at it against the needs of Irish employers and workers "to see if we can reduce it down to a hierarchy of one fundamental piece of legislation on top - the new Act - underpinned by maybe sets of regulations, very few of them, which would apply to all employers".
Beneath that would be sets of regulations that apply to particular sectors. Any sector could look at the new Act, one general set of regulations and perhaps a specific regulation, possibly backed up by modern codes of practice by sector. "Codes of practice are the way forward in a sense because you can change them without going through the long drawn-out formal processes of making law."
The new Act could be constructed in such a way that it could enable this radical overhaul to take place. "For example, take the Dangerous Substances Act - and I'm not saying that that would be changed - but let's take that as a case in point. What you would do would be examine it and all the regulations under it. You would get the new stuff ready. And on a certain date then you would trigger the repeal of the old stuff and the introduction of the new stuff."
Mr Walsh reckons there's a good five years' work in bringing that new legal framework into place and he would be happy to play a part in it.
How does he feel about moving on? "It's not an easy move on for me by any means. But I think I've almost got over the grieving process in a sense. In all of my working life, I have been driven. I'm glad I have other challenges to go on to. I'm still very active mentally and I've an awful lot of energy left."
jmarms@irish-times.ie
