Site management failures, rather than the actions of victims, are largely to blame for construction industry fatalities, an in-depth study by the Health and Safety Authority has concluded.
It also found that nearly half of all fatal accidents occurred at sites where a project supervisor had not been appointed, as required by law.
It calls for campaigns and new legislation to be targeted at company headquarter level, to try to reduce the "disproportionate number" of people killed on building sites.
The unpublished study was released yesterday to The Irish Times at the end of a week in which three men were killed in separate construction site accidents.
The man who died in the most recent accident, at a G&T Crampton building site in Ringsend, Dublin, was named yesterday as Mr Thomas O'Neill (31), from Lucan. He was married with two children.
On Monday a man died when a trench he was working on collapsed at a site in Ballymun, Dublin, while on Wednesday a man in his 60s was killed in a trench in Co Louth.
The Minister of State for Labour Affairs, Mr Frank Fahey, said yesterday that three deaths in a week were tragic and unacceptable. Under legislation to be introduced next year, he said, new maximum penalties for those found responsible for workplace accidents would range from €3,000 to €300,000, in place of the current District Court maximum of €1,900.
In its study, examining the contributory factors behind construction site accidents from 1991 to 2001, the HSA says there is "widespread concern" at the number of fatalities in the industry.
Last year, 28 per cent of all workplace fatalities occurred in the construction sector. Improvements have been made, however, and the rate of construction site fatalities has remained fairly constant in recent years in spite of a huge increase of the number of people working in the industry.
Mr Jim Heffernan, the HSA's senior inspector for construction, said the rate of fatalities per 100,000 construction workers had nearly halved since 1998.
Inspectors were also finding that bigger companies in particular were becoming more aware of their responsibilities towards health and safety. The number of voluntary closures of sites secured by inspectors was dramatically down this year, from 33 to 55 last year.
This was indicative of a much greater level of compliance, he said.
Mr Fahey also pointed out that 160,000 construction workers had been trained in the "safe pass" scheme since its introduction last year, and a further 20,000 would be trained by next April.
Nevertheless, the HSA study, by Ms Marie Dalton, says construction remains second only to agriculture and forestry in terms of fatalities.
Her study of causal factors found that site management failures were 47 per cent to blame for construction site fatal accidents.
Actions by company headquarters and victims were found to be 28 per cent and 24 per cent to blame, respectively.
The study concluded, however, that future campaigns and legislation should be directed at companies' headquarters.
"The knock-on effects of failures suggests that remedial action at HQ level could pre-empt errors further along the project chain," it said.
It found that 45 per cent of fatal accidents between 1998 and 2001 had occurred at sites which had not appointed project supervisors for the design and construction stages.
