The Health and Safety Authority may not be able to carry out surprise inspections due to restrictions to protect against Covid-19, its chief executive Dr Sharon McGuinness will tell an Oireachtas committee on Tuesday.
“As a general rule, authority inspections are unannounced. However, due to the fact that workplaces may have different working arrangements in place to protect against Covid-19, the authority may need in a number of cases to arrange a suitable time to visit,” the head of the workplace safety watchdog will tell the committee.
The authority will also confirm to the committee at Tuesday’s hearing that it is assigning 67 field inspectors out of its 109-strong inspectorate to check on workplace safety under the Covid-19 Return to Work Safely protocol.
Inspectors
Dr McGuinness will say the authority must retain a cohort of inspectors to ensure the authority’s “other legal obligations are met across our various mandates”.
It plans to focus Covid-19 inspections on sectors due to open under the Government’s reopening plan and based on complaints received.
Ahead of the hearing, Dr McGuinness told The Irish Times in an interview that determining whether a fatality from Covid-19 resulted from an infection contracted in a workplace or a work activity was a “real challenge”.
She said that it was “very tricky” to determine whether a coronavirus death was a result of workplace activity.
“One of the challenges for all of us in relation to Covid is that there may have been worker fatalities where Covid was a factor – whether it happened in the workplace or not, or as a result of a work activity, is a different question,” she said.
“It is not as simple to say a worker contracted Covid and there was a fatality. We have to check that that actually happened in the workplace or was it attributable to the work activity going on?”
Dr McGuinness encouraged greater engagement between employers and employees under a protocol published by the Government to ensure that workers adhered to health and safety guidelines at home where there were large numbers of workers living in shared rental accommodation.
Clusters
“Covid is everywhere and our remit is very much in the workplace. People coming to and from work, how people live outside work, none of that is in our remit but clearly the activities and actions in that regard can have an impact in the workplace,” she said.
A spokesman said that more than 200 complaints received by the HSA in March and April in relation to non-adherence to Covid-19 guidances did not require on-site inspections.
The spread of the virus in meat processing plants where there are 12 clusters – or one in every four plants in the country – with as many as 600 infected workers is attributed in part to the number of lower-paid foreign workers sharing accommodation outside of workplaces.
The State's chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan told the Department of Health's week-daily Covid-19 briefing that the national outbreak control teams issued guidance in different languages on risks facing employees who are travelling to work together or sharing accommodation.
