A 27-year-old man was killed yesterday on a construction site in Co Wicklow, a fortnight after workers protested about safety standards in the industry.
Mr Darren Kelly, who was single, of Belclare Lawns, Ballymun, died after a machine he was driving came into contact with an overhead power line.
The accident happened at about 9 a.m. at the Diamond Valley apartment complex on Upper Dargle Road in Bray.
Mr Kelly was taken to St Columcille's Hospital in Loughlinstown, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
A spokesman for the Health and Safety Authority said the incident was being investigated. Inspectors from the HSA and gardaí visited the site yesterday.
Mr Kelly's death was the first on a construction site this year, following 22 fatalities in 2002. However, Mr Denis Farrell of the Building and Allied Trades Union, said it was time for the talking about fatalities in the industry to stop and for action to address the issue to begin.
Mr Farrell said he could not comment on yesterday's incident as the causes had not yet been established.
In general, however, fatalities caused by contact with overhead power lines should be avoidable, he said.
They were similar to fatalities caused by trench collapses in that they were "not straightforward accidents - they are foreseeable events".
He repeated a call he made at this month's protest for the introduction of a penalty points system for building companies that breach health and safety regulations.
BATU also wants "corporate manslaughter" to be introduced as a criminal offence.
Mr Peter McCabe, director of safety with the Construction Industry Federation, said accidents were difficult to eliminate in an industry involving so much activity, "but we are making every effort and we will continue to do it".
He pointed out that the construction advisory committee of the HSA, which has employers and unions among its membership, would be meeting today to begin analysing the causes of accidents.
"We need to get inside and behind the various contributory causes, not so that we can go around blaming each other, but to look at it in terms of what's there."
Nobody would be victimised on a construction site for upholding safety standards, he said.
"We would appeal to people every hour of every day to observe, to expect and to make tough decisions, and not to be alert after the event."
Speaking in the Dáil on Tuesday, the Minister of State for Labour Affairs, Mr Frank Fahey, said the Health, Safety and Welfare at Work Bill would be introduced in April.
The Bill would place greater responsibilities on employers and introduce heavier fines for health and safety breaches, he said.
Mr Fahey said the construction industry had been "notorious" in the past for being negligent about safety in the workplace, but there was now "a much better culture of prevention and awareness".
"Changes have taken place. There is mandatory safety representation on sites with more than 20 employees and mandatory safety training with registration cards and there are safety officers and defined roles for site safety representatives."
The FÁS safe pass programme, he added, had trained more than 185,000 people in the industry.
He accepted, however, that not enough had been done and he had invited construction industry and union representatives to meet him to establish "why the continuing significant efforts are not yielding better results".
