Address by Mr. Tom Kitt, T.D.,Minister for Labour AffairsAt the Launch of the IBEC Safety Guide on Occupational Safety and Health at WorkIBEC, Baggot Street, D2Wednesday 6th June 2001, 5.00pm,

Thank you for inviting me here this evening to launch the IBEC Safety Guide on Occupational Safety and Health at Work. This is an excellent, well-structured and informative document. The Guide brings together the principal legal requirements pertaining to workplace health and safety, while at the same time serving as an invaluable guide and practical reference manual for all employers and managers at workplace level, helping to clearly map the way forward for the proper management of health and safety across a range of sectors.

Proper preventative management is, of course, at the core of any workplace health and safety management system. An appropriate health and safety management system will, in any organisation, set out the direction for that organisation to follow in order to comply with the national health and safety laws as a minimum and also to put accident and ill health prevention on a sound business level. Successful companies in the business sense, have a good health and safety management system for this very reason. They wish to minimise costs and one of the areas where costs increase is following a workplace accident. Preventing workplace fatalities, accidents and ill-health will directly cut costs and providing high workplace standards will have long-term financial benefits by helping to both attract and retain valuable staff and contribute positively to productivity.

The well-being of any business is intrinsically linked to the well-being of its employees. A responsible employer and manager who seeks out the information contained in this Guide is in the long-term seeking to improve the success and competitiveness of his or her business. By well-being we should mean, quite literally, the physical and psychological well-being of all employees. By responsibility we should mean, in the first instance, the statutory responsibility imposed by the comprehensive legal framework in operation and secondly the moral responsibility on all of us not to put the health or safety of either ourselves or others at risk. And yes, of course, employees have significant duties and responsibilities towards themselves and towards others.

But part of managing properly is ensuring that there are appropriate structures and systems in place to encourage and facilitate appropriate staff action and input.

The Health and Safety Authority, as the State agency with responsibility for the administration, enforcement and promotion of workplace health and safety legislation, works closely with all parties to improve health and safety standards in Irish employments. IBEC is of course represented on the Board of the Authority. I am well aware, however, that the involvement and commitment of Tony Briscoe, Marie Rock and Peter McCabe goes beyond simply attending Board meetings. It also involves them actively participating on a plethora of Board Sub-Committees and HSA Advisory Committees. The extent of this input - and in fairness it is the same from both sides of the social partnership - is not often publicly known or acknowledged, but it makes an enormous contribution to the advancement of good health and safety standards in Ireland, at both a national level and at workplace level.

In the period of time since, I took over Ministerial responsibility for the area of occupational health and safety, I have seen the issue become far more prominent a business issue than ever before. At all levels - State, employer and worker - the awareness of workplace safety has increased enormously. The commitment by the State and the Social Partners to continue to seek to improve workplace health and safety standards is underpinned in the national Programme, the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness. This is, indeed, a strong acknowledgement of the importance and relevance of the issue as a contributory factor to a better living and working environment for all our citizens. Without a doubt health and safety is now part of the public pschye and one of the main challenges facing all of us is how to translate awareness into real action at the level of the workplace.

I would like to commend and thank IBEC, and of course, Tony Briscoe in particular, for your insight and hard work in producing this Guide and for supporting your members to work towards making this transition from awareness to action. It is a user-friendly document which will serve as an effective "one-stop-shop" for occupational health and safety management. The Guide will be complementary to the literature and publications of the Health and Safety Authority, and I would urge all business practitioners to obtain a copy of the Guide in the interests of improving workplace health and safety standards.