The North Tipperary Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) will be holding a farm safety awareness event tomorrow, Tuesday (July 4), in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary.
The event, which will be taking place in the Central Auctions Co-op mart in Nenagh, is set to take place at 12:30pm and is expected to run for a couple of hours.
Tim Cullinan, Chairman of North Tipperary IFA, said that the obvious objective of the day is to create and spread awareness on the issue of farm safety. This will be done in a number of ways throughout the event.
Red Cross will also be speaking at the event, Cullinan said, to inform farmers of what to do in the event of a serious accident. Accident scenes covered include getting wrapped around a PTO, getting trapped under a bale and other such nightmare scenarios.
To further illustrate the message from these possible accidents, live enactments of getting into trouble with a bale, as well as other incidents, will take place. This will provide a greater understanding of best-practice reactions.
Children from one of the local schools will be attending the event to learn about the importance of farm safety, Cullinan added.
Various aspects of farm safety will be covered on the day, including handling livestock and creating awareness regarding the dangers of machinery.
Commenting on the event, Cullinan said: “I think it’s important that people at the mart [earlier in the day] would hang on and that people from the surrounding areas would support the event and maybe learn from it.
“With farm safety in general, we’ve had so many fatal accidents already this year – so it’s clearly a serious problem.
If we could prevent one accident with this event, it’ll all be worthwhile. I know everyone is busy at this time of year but, if people can set aside just a few minutes, it will be worth it.
“If people pause for a minute to think safety first, it could make all the difference,” Cullinan concluded.