Farming killed 13 people in Ireland in 2023. The HSA has decided that the existing guidance is no longer good enough, and they are right.
The Health and Safety Authority has opened a public consultation on a revised Code of Practice for Safety, Health and Welfare in Agriculture. This is not a cosmetic update. The direction of travel is clear: tighter requirements, more specific documentation, and a harder look at how farms actually manage risk day to day. If your current safety statement was written five years ago and has not been touched since, it will not hold up against what is coming.
The consultation window is the time to understand what is changing, not to wait and see. Codes of Practice carry real legal weight in Ireland. Under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, if you depart from a relevant Code and an incident occurs, you have to demonstrate in court that you met the standard another way. That is a difficult conversation to have when someone is in hospital.
What the New Code Is Targeting
The revised Code puts agricultural risk assessment at its centre. Not a generic checklist, but a documented process that reflects your specific operation, your specific hazards, and the people working on your land, including family members and seasonal workers.
The areas getting the sharpest attention include:
Tractor and machinery operation. Overturning vehicles remain the single biggest killer on Irish farms. The new guidance presses harder on rollover protection, pre-operation checks, and the exclusion of children from operating zones. If your machinery inspection records are informal or non-existent, that needs to change.
Slurry and confined spaces. Slurry tank incidents kill quickly and they often kill the rescuers too. The Code is expected to tighten requirements around atmospheric testing, permit-to-work systems, and rescue equipment. A verbal briefing before opening a tank lid is not a system of work.
Falls from height. Roof work on farm buildings, ladder use, and access to grain stores all feature. The requirements around working at height are being aligned more closely with what construction sites have been obliged to do for years. That gap always made limited sense.
Children on farms. This section is getting significant attention. The Code will set clearer boundaries on where children can be, when, and what supervision looks like. This is an uncomfortable area for family operations but the statistics justify it.
What Your Safety Statement Needs to Reflect
A safety statement is not a document you file and forget. It is a live risk management tool, and the revised Code will make that expectation explicit.
Your agricultural risk assessment needs to identify every significant hazard on the holding. Not the hazards on a generic farm. Your farm. That means walking the ground, looking at the actual layout, and documenting what you find. It means naming the people at risk, including contractors who come on site regularly.
The controls you list have to be real. A sign on a gate is not a control for slurry exposure. A conversation at the start of the season is not training. The Code will draw a clearer line between what constitutes a genuine control measure and what constitutes paperwork that fills a gap.
Dates matter too. When was the assessment last reviewed? If your operation has changed, your statement has to reflect that. New machinery, new buildings, new workers, a bad near-miss: all of these should trigger a review.
The Consultation Is an Opportunity, Not a Formality
The HSA does not open consultations for show. Submissions from farm operators, contractors, and safety professionals genuinely shape the final document. If there are provisions in the draft that are unworkable for your type of operation, the consultation is where you say so. Organisations representing tillage farmers have different concerns to those running suckler herds. That specificity matters.
The draft Code is available on the HSA website. Read the sections that apply to your operation. If something is unclear or the proposed standard seems disconnected from operational reality, submit a response. The window will close, the Code will be finalised, and after that the conversation shifts from shaping the standard to meeting it.
Getting Your Operation Ready Before It Becomes Mandatory
You do not need to wait for the Code to be finalised to start the work. The direction is clear enough.
Pull out your current safety statement and read it critically. Does it describe what actually happens on your farm, or does it describe a theoretical farm that vaguely resembles yours? Are the risk controls listed things you actually do, or things someone typed in to complete the document?
Book time for a proper site walkthrough. Identify the five highest-risk activities on your holding. For most farms that will include tractor operation, slurry handling, working at height, chemical storage, and something specific to your enterprise, whether that is livestock handling, grain drying, or machinery maintenance. Document what you see, not what you wish was there.
Check your training records. If a worker cannot produce evidence of relevant training and an inspector asks, the burden is on you. That includes family members who operate machinery.
Look at your incident and near-miss records. Understanding the pattern behind incidents is exactly what the revised Code is designed to support. If you have had near-misses that were never recorded, start recording them now.
The farmers who treat this as an administrative annoyance will spend 2026 scrambling to catch up after an inspection. The ones who use the consultation period to genuinely review their operation will find that the new Code mostly confirms what good practice already looks like.
Thirteen deaths in a single year is not a bureaucratic problem. It is a real one, and a revised Code of Practice is a reasonable response to it.
