“He was a hard worker, the sort who’d do everything twice to make sure it was done right,” Deirdre Byrne said of her late son James, “but the accident came out of the blue.”
She and her daughter Deborah, from Ringsend, Dublin, came to the Garden of Remembrance in the city centre on Monday to mark Workers’ Memorial Day.
They placed flowers during the ceremony in memory of James Byrne, a welder and father of two who worked for Doyle Shipping Group Unlimited in Dublin.
Mr Byrne, who was 39, died at the firm’s Ocean Pier facility on June 6th, 2018, when a 10-metre steel column fell on him.
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Deborah Byrne said her brother had been left alone on a job that three men were required to finish after the fatal incident.
He had been dismantling a hopper, a huge machine used to unload grain from ships, and was well into the process when the column he was working on detached and struck him.
He is survived by his partner Paula Murray and sons Nathan and Callum, then aged 18 and 10, as well as his wider family.
Reflecting on her son’s death, Deirdre Byrne said: “There should be more checks by companies, making sure they’re not overworking the workers, making sure they’re not left on their own to do heavy work.
“Companies can never do enough because they can’t see everything that’s happening with their employees, so they need to do everything they can to make sure things like this don’t happen.”
Mr Byrne’s employer was fined €850,000 in 2020 for safety breaches that contributed to the incident, with the judge saying the figure would have been higher had it not provided evidence of having invested substantially to ensure nothing like the accident would happen again.
Monday’s event was organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) and the Health and Safety Authority (HSA). It was attended by Minister of State Neale Richmond and by Sean Downey of the Construction Industry Federation as well as workers and members of the emergency services.
Ictu general secretary Owen Reidy said progress had been made in terms of workplace safety, with last year’s total of 34 fatalities the lowest since the HSA’s establishment.
But he said: “No one should have to put their life at risk earning a living.”
Mr Reidy welcomed the reduction in the number of deaths in agriculture and construction, but said much more needed to be done.
“I think it’s important that we also dedicate this occasion to the thousands of workers who contract industrial diseases each year. Far from this being a thing of the past, occupational diseases are on the increase,” he said.
“Some 100,000 workers in Europe die every year from occupational cancer due to exposure to hazardous substances, and we know that longer working hours bring psychological pressures and can cause heart disease, stroke, depression and, in some cases, suicide.”
Mr Downey said the downward trend of serious incidents in the construction sector was welcome, but “we’re not there yet, we need to do more to identify and eliminate risks and drive policy to help us get the figure to zero.
“We also need to drive out the culture of under-reporting among the FDI, the foreign companies that want to say ‘We don’t have any incident on our projects’, because that’s just not realistic.”
HSA chief inspector Mark Cullen said the organisation would continue to work with industry bodies and unions to reduce numbers and said there would be more workplace inspections over the coming years.
