Too much health and safety is hard to take

I’m all in favour of having standards in place to reduce the risk of people causing harm to themselves while carrying out dangerous tasks. We hear all too regularly about serious accidents that could have been prevented if a little care had been exercised. We often hear during the summer time of children being involved in farm accidents and we hear of workplace accidents that could have been prevented for the want of some simple precautions. So health and safety standards were introduced to reduce the risks of injury to workers and that’s fair enough.

But there are some people who take a different view. When I was growing up I couldn’t understand why so many fishermen went out to work every day without wearing a life jacket. The answer I was given was that most of them couldn’t swim and if something was to happen to them that would cause them to end up in the water then they didn’t want to waste time struggling to survive in a sea that was eventually going to claim their lives anyway. They wanted it to end quickly so they didn’t go to sea prepared for a fight.

Recently I heard a young lad being interviewed on the radio after surviving a serious crash. By all accounts he was lucky to survive with the injuries that he sustained but he was wearing a seat belt and that saved his life. But during the interview he explained that he never normally wore one but he did that night and he doesn’t know why he did. He said that he likes to drive fast but probably wouldn’t wear the seat belt again.

There is room to improve

At the other end of the spectrum you have the guys who go completely over the top. I was watching a programme on RTE recently called Room to Improve. For any of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a show about an architect who takes on projects of renovating homes for different couples and turns them from bog standard houses to state of the art homes. It’s a pleasant enough show but it is a little predictable.

The show follows a formula. It starts off with an agreed plan, work gets underway, then there’s the mix up in the interpretation of the drawings between the architect and the builder, then we have the dispute about the over run in costs before the final reveal where the champagne is uncorked and everyone pats each other on the back for a job well done. But, in spite of all that, it’s a pleasant enough show and the results are generally impressive.

At various points in the show the architect meets with the owners of the property on site to see how the work is progressing. A building site can be a dangerous environment so you need to take precautions when you are going anywhere near one and that’s fine. But on the show I was watching, the three of them met on the side of the road at the entrance to the property. They didn’t actually go beyond the front gate but each of them was wearing a hard hat and a high-viz vest and to be honest it looked a bit ridiculous.

If we want to make a statement about health and safety then we need to get a small bit realistic. If we want people to start taking it seriously then we need to start using some common sense. Having three adults standing at the entrance to a building site, kitted out like Bob the Builder is not going to impress anyone. Let’s be honest, a stray bird poop or perhaps a nettle sting was the only potential threat that they were likely to face. If they were in danger standing at the gate, then the builders were in serious trouble.

Time for some common sense

You’re average Joe soap who wants to paint the gable end of his house is not going to put on a hard hat, goggles, fireproof overalls, industrial gloves and steel toe capped boots. And there is a very simple reason why he won’t do that. Because if he does he won’t be able to see properly so he’ll probably end up painting the wrong house. He won’t be able to feel anything so he’ll constantly drop the paint brush and he’ll lose his footing on the ladder and cause himself an injury falling off it. The hard hat will be redundant because there is nothing to fall on top of him unless a passing Boeing 747 gets into bother and in that case the plastic hat won’t help much. If we expect people to take health and safety seriously then we need to be practical about it and use some common sense when introducing guide lines.

You can’t make every action completely safe and there will always be a certain element of danger with some tasks. You could, for instance, burn your hand while boiling an egg. But you could definitely reduce the risk by taking some precautions before cooking over a naked flame. On the other hand, you could go down the road of having to prepare a safety statement, placing safety notices on every door and wearing fire- proof overalls, hard hat, goggles and gloves while having a unit of the local fire service and the Red Cross on standby in the driveway. That might make you safer but you would probably just give up on the egg.

It might happen that you won’t be allowed to put out the wheelie bin unless you have a safe handling degree from a recognised university. Or, you may not be allowed to wipe your bottom or flush the toilet without having completed a course in waste management. This is where we are headed so you better get ready for it.