Farmer Mental Health and Farm Safety: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2025-11-12 ============================================================ Paul Daly (FF), Agricultural Panel I welcome the Ministers of State. While it is not unprecedented to have two here, it is very unusual. There is a reason I asked for the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, to be here when I requested a debate on farm safety and farmer health and well-being. There is a little anomaly. I have been here since 2016 and, back in the day, we used to have debates on farm safety awareness during Farm Safety Week. However, in recent years, Farm Safety Week has fallen during our recess so we have not been afforded the opportunity to highlight the issues pertaining and related to farm safety. When asking for the debate on farm safety, I felt it would be a fantastic statement from us in the Seanad to have Deputy Butler here along with Deputy Healy-Rae, whom I welcome, to raise awareness of the fact that when we talk about farmer health and well-being, we talk about mental health as well as physical health. While, as I have said, it might be unusual to have two Ministers here, I genuinely could have gone for the hat-trick. Perhaps I should have because the HSA, the body that ultimately polices safety, is under the remit of the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment. I could have been greedy and gone for a hat-trick of Ministers. That is a big part of the problems we have when it comes to farmer health and well-being and farm safety. If you have more than one Department involved, things fall between the cracks. Everybody is responsible but there can be situations where ultimately nobody is responsible. On the importance of the mental side, I am going to use an analogy. I am addicted to a programme about air traffic accident investigations. It is not a good pastime to have when you fly. When you are sitting on the runway, you think you hear a rattle in the plane that reminds you of an episode you have seen where a similar rattle caused a crash in Hong Kong or somewhere. I am big into it because of the thorough investigations that are carried out after each accident. The investigators will not put the file away until they know the reason for whatever happened. Some 60% to 80% come down to human or pilot error. It has been proven. The same investigations are not done on the farm safety side but it is thoroughly investigated on that side. The vast majority of that human or pilot error - it is not necessarily the pilot but it can involve air traffic control - comes down to mental fatigue and stress. There are strict rules about the number of hours pilots and air traffic control people can work. Those rules do not exist in agriculture. At the busy time of the season, the farmer is on the tractor for a hell of a lot longer than the pilot is on the plane. It only makes sense that there would be mental stress and fatigue involved. While that is a major problem in itself, it is also most likely leading to some of the physical accidents. I will not go into all of the statistics because the Minister of State has just given them but, unfortunately, two fifths or 40% of all fatal accidents in the workplace occur in the agriculture sector although only 6.5% of the workforce is in that sector. That tells a story in itself. We are mixing chemicals, heavy machinery and animals and, in many cases, the farmyard of daddy and mammy is the playground of the offspring. There are a lot of things going on. There are a lot of things at play. It is very hard to get one ideal solution that fixes all because there are so many different people involved. The Minister of State, Deputy Healy-Rae, will be rolled out because of his responsibility in the Department of agriculture but, at the end of the day, he is probably having to work with the HSA, which is under another Department. I introduced a Bill in the Seanad a couple of years ago. It is still in the system. I would like the Department to look at it again. While I am not in favour of quangos, this Bill sets up a farm safety agency modelled on the Road Safety Authority. It deserves consideration and should be revisited and looked at again because we might see fit to put such a body together. That would pull all of the different strands of the web together. There would then be one body answerable for farm safety, farmer well-being, farmer mental health and farmer physical well-being. I am aware of the farm safety partnership but this would go a step further. I will address Deputy Butler as Chief Whip rather than as Minister of State on this next point. It may be dangerous to mention media training but, when you do media training with experts, they will talk about the negative bias of talk radio. In other words, negativity is the punchline on such programmes. If you are a farmer during the summer months harvesting or making silage or hay when the pressure is on, you can potentially be sitting into your tractor at 6 a.m. and listening to talk radio until midnight. If there is a negative bias, as has been proven, what does that do to your mental health? You are also looking up at the clouds through your windscreen to see whether it is going to rain. You are looking back at the trailer and perhaps the yield is not what you thought it would be. There are many other things going on. In a great many cases, you are on your own. It is about the isolation. I welcome the schemes the Minister of State has mentioned. I compliment the organisations, the IFA and the other representative bodies, which collectively do fantastic work with the farmer health check. Agrikids provides training in schools to educate the children in safety. When the children are educated and made aware of the safety measures that are needed, they will police the adult generation. If the children learn it in school and come home and see their daddy or mammy taking a risk or doing something that they have been taught in school is the wrong way to go, there is nobody better than a child to police you. Education is part of it. The FRS farm safety awareness training and the Bord Bia skin cancer awareness are the Minister of State's initiatives, and I welcome them. I was privileged to be asked by her to chair her launch at the ploughing championships of the 15,000 free counselling hours. It is so important that the man I just mentioned, when he gets off his tractor, does not have change his clothes or anything if he wants to reach out; he can do it at his own kitchen table. The Minister of State kept using that phrase and it is a brilliant one - he can do it from his own kitchen table. I welcome that. There has been a lot done, but there is a lot more to be done. The pulling of it all together under one agency may be the answer. It will not be a magic wand, but it certainly may be a step in the right direction. I welcome the priorities in the programme for Government to continue to prioritise improvements in farm safety and health and well-being through the strengthening supports. I welcome the supports that the Minister of State, Deputy Healy-Rae, has put funding into new PTOs. He has done a lot of work with awareness and a lot of very good work in the area. The Minister of State, Deputy Butler, is placing a specific focus on farmer mental health and well-being. Again, I welcome that. We want to promote positive mental health and well-being across the farming sector. That is the programme for Government and now we just need to go and do it. So far, I have to compliment the Minister of State. I will conclude on Bertie Ahern's famous statement: a lot done, but there is a hell of a lot more to do. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-11-12/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:18+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-11-12