Kerry County Council loses in legal case to prevent investigation into fatal incident

Kerry County Council has lost a case to stop the Health and Safety Authority investigating a road traffic incident in which a young man died.

Don Murphy (22), an ESB apprentice of Knocknaloman, Rathmore, Co Kerry, was fatally injured in the single-vehicle crash on September 29th, 2012.

He was alone in the car when the accident occurred about 10pm on the N72 at Rathmore, where the council had been installing traffic calming measures the previous day.

He was pronounced dead at the scene.

High Court
Kerry County Council had asked the High Court to stop the authority investigating the incident on grounds it did not occur at a place of work as defined under the 2005 Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act.

The authority argued the site of the incident remained a place of work until all works there had been completed.

In his ruling yesterday, the president of the High Court, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, ruled the site of the incident was a place of work at the time of the accident.

From the evidence, he was “quite satisfied” the stretch of roadway where the crash occurred was, at the relevant time, “very much a place of work in the same way as a building construction site retains that character over the course of a weekend when work is temporarily suspended”, he said.

“At no stretch of the imagination, could it be suggested that works at this site were completed,” the judge said.

All the documents in the case made clear the road works were intended to last for a period of 20 weeks and the incident occurred three weeks into the project, and at a weekend when works were merely suspended, he said.

There was no question the workers who left this particular site had completed their functions there, he added.

The 2006 Construction Regulations define a construction site as “any site at which construction work in relation to a project is carried out”, he noted. The site of this fatal incident was clearly such a site.

Roadworks
The judge added he might have reached a different conclusion if the works had been suspended for a period of weeks or months, during which the roadway might have been deemed as having returned to its normal status.

A “very different” situation existed here where work at the site was “merely suspended” for the weekend and construction work was incomplete.

Plant and machinery remained at the site in advance of recommencement of work the Monday following the incident.