Every year, Irish workers die on public roads during the working day. Not on sites. Not in factories. On the N7 at 8:40am, driving a company van to a job. The employer's name ends up in the report anyway.
The Health and Safety Authority has made driving for work a formal inspection priority. Inspectors are visiting businesses, reviewing records, and asking questions that most safety statements don't come close to answering. The fines are real. The prosecutions are real. And the gap between what employers think they have in place and what the law actually requires is wider than most people want to admit.
What the Inspection Campaign Is Actually Looking For
The HSA isn't just checking whether your vans have a current NCT. Inspectors are looking at the system behind the driving. They want to see a documented risk assessment that covers work-related driving as a workplace activity. They want evidence that drivers have been assessed for competency, not just a copy of their licence on file. They want to know how journey times are being managed, how fatigue is being controlled, and what happens when a driver reports a vehicle defect.
If your answer to any of those questions is "we tell them to use common sense," you're in difficulty.
The law is clear on this. Under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, driving on public roads for work purposes is a work activity. The duty of care follows the worker out the gate. That means your obligations around risk assessment, safe systems of work, and employee welfare don't stop when someone turns the ignition key.
The Risk Assessment Gap
Most businesses that have a driving risk assessment have one that was written once, filed somewhere, and hasn't been reviewed since the van got a new reg plate. The HSA is not impressed by a document. It's looking for evidence the document is live and in use.
A proper driving for work risk assessment covers several things that generic templates tend to skip. Journey planning, including whether routes are realistic for the time allocated. Driver health, including whether fatigue, medication use, or medical conditions have been discussed. Vehicle loading, particularly in vans where roof loads, floor loads, and unsecured tools can turn a rear-end shunt into a fatality. Phone use policy, with evidence it's been communicated and enforced, not just typed into a handbook.
The gap between a policy document and an enforced policy is exactly where employer liability gets established after an incident. Insurers know this. Solicitors know this. Now the HSA is actively checking for it.
Vehicle Safety Is Not the Same as a Service Record
A van with a valid service history can still be a liability waiting to happen. Tyre pressure, tyre tread depth, brake condition, load restraint, visibility, lighting, all of these need to be checked on a schedule that doesn't depend on the annual service. The driver doing a two-minute walk-around before a long run isn't bureaucracy. It's the minimum.
Load restraint deserves its own paragraph. Unsecured tools and materials in the back of a van are projectiles in a collision. A 20kg toolbox travelling at 80km/h relative to the cab interior will not stop because someone wrote "secure all loads" in a policy. Physical restraints, racking systems, and partition barriers are what actually prevent that outcome. Inspectors are checking for these. Courts have seen cases where load restraint failures contributed to driver fatalities, and the employer paid for it.
What Happens When It Goes Wrong
The financial exposure from a serious work-related road collision is not limited to the insurance claim. If the HSA investigates and finds a failure in the system of work, the employer faces prosecution under health and safety legislation. Fines under the 2005 Act run to €3 million on indictment. Individual directors can face personal liability. The reputational damage, loss of contracts, and staff retention impact are separate costs on top.
Recent HSA prosecutions show a consistent pattern. It is rarely a single catastrophic failure that leads to conviction. It's a documented absence of a system, combined with an incident that would not have happened if the system existed. The prosecution writes itself from the gap between what was required and what was done.
What You Should Fix Before an Inspector Arrives
Start with the risk assessment. If you don't have one that covers driving as a workplace activity, write one. If you have one, read it today and check whether it reflects how your drivers actually work. The version describing a 9-to-5 rep doing planned client visits is probably not fit for a team of tradespeople covering three counties with unscheduled callouts.
Check driver records. Licence categories, penalty point totals, and whether anyone has disclosed a medical condition that affects their driving. An employer who doesn't know that a driver has 10 penalty points has a problem they've chosen not to look at.
Formalise vehicle checks. A dated, signed pre-use checklist takes three minutes and produces a paper trail. When a tyre blows and someone asks whether the vehicle was checked, you want the answer to be yes and have the record to prove it.
Set a phone policy and enforce it. Zero tolerance means zero tolerance, not zero tolerance unless it's a quick call. One prosecution arising from a phone-related collision where the employer had a written policy but no evidence of enforcement is one prosecution too many.
The Broader Point
Driving for work is the most common way Irish workers are seriously injured or killed during working hours. It's also the area where employers most consistently believe their informal arrangements are good enough. The HSA's inspection campaign is a corrective to that belief.
The road doesn't care that it was a quick drive.
