When Denise McCann got a call five years ago on the way into work and heard her brother telling her to go instead to her sister’s house, she knew something bad had happened. Just not how bad it was.
As the family gathered in Clondalkin, across the city in Ringsend members of the fire brigade were trying to retrieve her father, John, from the bottom of a ventilation shaft.
John, a 62-year-old father of seven and grandfather who worked for a contractor for Total Splicing Solutions, had been supervising cabling work at the Ove Arup building when he fell through a lightweight covering on the shaft at sixth-floor level.
A Circuit Court hearing would subsequently be told the covering looked more sturdy than it was but that warning signs around it were inadequate and safety concerns had been raised 13 months earlier but not acted upon. Neither John, who was safety conscious and hugely experienced, or the two men he was working with had any idea of the danger.
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John fell 24 metres and sustained multiple injuries. Denise recalls sitting and waiting for news over a number of hours as efforts to recover him continued. In the end, the news came that they had got him out “but he was gone”.
Ove Arup would subsequently be found guilty of two breaches of the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act, 2005 and pay a fine of €750,000.
In a statement at the time the company said it accepted the verdict and apologised to the McCanns for the failings involved.
Denise and a number of other family members will attend an event to mark Workers’ Memorial Day at the Garden of Remembrance on Monday morning in the hope, she says, that highlighting what happened her father might raise awareness of the fact that people are still killed in the course of their work and many of those deaths, like John’s are entirely preventable.
“It’s still happening,” she says. “And every time you hear about someone else, it brings it back. My Da just wanted to go to work and come home again, he couldn’t wait to retire because he’d been doing the job for long and there were all these things he wanted to do. It’s shocking that he lost his life while just trying to do his job.”
The family’s experience in the aftermath of the accident highlights the difficulties often faced by relatives of accidents in the workplace as they wrestle with what feels at times like being bit part players in an endlessly prolonged process.
He did a lot for the community and is so missed, not just by family
John’s accident was in September 2019 and the subsequent outbreak of Covid certainly contributed to the delays but the prosecution only went ahead last June and Denise recalls the family struggling even to hear what was being said in a courtroom packed with people waiting for other cases to go on.
Now the family are waiting for the inquest they hope will provide more answers about the details of what happened that day. “They said it couldn’t go ahead until the court case but we thought once that happened it would be a few weeks. It’ll be a year in June and he’ll be deal five years in September,” she says, becoming overwhelmed by emotion at times.
In addition to the fine, Ove Arup contributed €40,000 to one of several community groups John McCann had worked with in Clondalkin and a new facility opened in the area this month was named in his honour.
“He did a lot for the community and is so missed, not just by family. He was known as Grizzly because he loved the outdoors, camping and all that ... and the big bear hugs. We miss those hugs.
“We couldn’t have done this in the first couple of years after it happened but if telling his story helps stop the same sort of thing happening somebody else then that would good. He’d have wanted that.”
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