The Court of Criminal Appeal has dismissed O’Flynn Construction Company Limited’s appeal against a €200,000 fine imposed after the company pleaded guilty to two construction-site safety offences. The offences followed a fatal explosion at a site in Rochestown, Cork, in September 2001.
The company was fined on one count, with the second offence taken into account. It appealed the severity of the penalty. The appeal court found the Circuit Court judge was entitled to impose the fine and that it was not unduly severe or wrong in principle.
The offences concerned failing to conduct the company’s undertaking so far as reasonably practicable to protect people outside its employment from safety or health risks, and failing to make the site’s surroundings and perimeter clearly visible and identifiable. The offences were not the direct or sole cause of the boy’s death, the appeal court said, but the company’s defaults were significant contributing factors in the circumstances that led to it.
The judgment recounts that the development, known as Mount Oval Village, covered more than 100 acres and was bordered by occupied housing estates, including Broadale. A 210-litre drum of wood preservative had been brought from another company site and left on a pallet in the open. The court said the people who delivered and unloaded it, and the project supervisor, had not been told it contained hazardous material or given safe-storage instructions.
Evidence before the Circuit Court included that children regularly entered the site and that there was no provision in the company’s safety plan to control unauthorised access. The appeal court also noted there was no site security during daytime hours or over the weekend of 7–9 September 2001, and no adequate procedure assigning responsibility for secure storage of deliveries from other sites. A security firm had been engaged three days before the incident following a tool burglary, but the court found no indication its work controlled or supervised access by children outside working periods.
The company argued in mitigation that fencing the full perimeter of such a large site was difficult, that it had safety consultants and storage procedures, and that the offences were not the direct cause of the death. The court found no recklessness, but concluded there was a serious degree of culpability. It also noted the guilty pleas and the company’s absence of prior convictions for this type of offence during 20 years in the construction industry. The court held the fine proportionate to the seriousness of the default and the company’s resources, and dismissed the appeal.