Farmer Mental Health and Farm Safety: Statements Seanad Éireann — 2025-11-12 ============================================================ Martin Conway (IND), Administrative Panel The Minister of State, Deputy Healy-Rae, is most welcome to the House. I know that he fully understands the challenges when it comes to farm safety. This year so far has outpassed last year in terms of the numbers of people who have lost their lives on Irish farms. Unfortunately, the profile of the people who have lost their lives shows that nine of them were over 65, which epitomises the age profile in farming generally. That would follow on to another conversation entirely about the inheritance system and passing on farms. Obviously, we need to do more in that space. I know the Minister of State and the Government are very much committed to that. It is not easy. It is challenging. It needs to be streamlined as much as possible, with as much encouragement as possible as well. In 2013, I was privileged to be the convenor of a subcommittee that looked at farm safety in this country as part of the Seanad Public Consultation Committee that was established then under Seanad reform. We looked for public submissions of ideas and suggestions on what could be done. We received over 60 written submissions at the time and we brought ten of their proponents in here to the Chamber on a Monday. Some of the suggestions and ideas were outstanding. The work that was being done by Embrace Farm at the time was particularly moving in terms of what it was doing to try to raise awareness. We had a lady who had written children books in the space of farm safety to try to raise awareness among children on the basis that children, by having good knowledge, would pass on that experience and knowledge to their parents - in other words, the converse of what normally happens. There was also a proposal at that time that there would be a scrappage scheme for outdated and old farm machinery that had seen its better days, and that that would be done through the budget and through a financial measure. Back then, however, as the Minister of State will be aware as he was here at the time, the circumstances were poor in terms of resources and it was hard to get any such budgetary measure over the line. It was also proposed that there would be a partnership with the GAA. What we suggested was that the GAA, which is a national organisation that has a club and activists in every parish and community in this country, would be encouraged to run farm safety awareness days. That suggestion came from a club in west Cork where somebody had tragically lost their life in a farm accident and the club had taken the initiative of having a farm safety day in the clubhouse where it brought in various different interested parties and had talks on farm safety, etc. It was seen as very progressive and successful. We recommended at the time that the Government would partially fund a farm safety officer to be based in Croke Park, who would roll out such a programme around the country. Following the publicity that the report got at the time, many clubs themselves ran farm safety awareness days. That could be looked at again. As a matter of fact, many of the proposals within that report are as relevant today as they were ten years ago. I would encourage the Minister of State's officials to give him the executive summary of that report and he might find something in it that would be worth pursuing. We have all been in situations where neighbours have lost their lives through farm accidents. I can remember that at the very start of the lockdown, a 14-year-old boy lost his life. He was a neighbour of mine. It was horrific. I will 100% support the Minister of State on anything that he and his Department can do to reduce and, hopefully, eliminate deaths on Irish farms. --- 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