Safety training for construction workers will costthe employers in the industry £30 million over the next 12 months, under new legislation.
But "macho" workers need to be more safety conscious and clients have to meet their responsibilities towards safety, the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) warned this weekend, at its conference in Tralee, Co Kerry.
"The macho end of the industry has been difficult to get out of. This is the attitude which says, 'I don't need a helmet, I don't need a harness'," Mr Peter McCabe, director of safety and training services with the CIF, said.
So far this year 11 workers and four children have been killed on construction sites.
The shortage of workers, combined with pressure from clients to finish work, meant management had sometimes been tolerant when workers breached safety regulations, he said.
"We'd be dismissing a lot of people if we had to dismiss everyone not wearing a helmet," Mr McCabe said.
The demands of clients for very fast finishing times made it difficult to cut out overtime in order to rest workers, he said.
At the end of the day, though, the onus was on project managers to implement regulations, even where workers were unwilling to do so.
Hung-over workers and those turning up not alert enough for highly dangerous work because of their lifestyles was a huge emerging problem in the construction industry, he said.
The CIF had asked unions and the Workers Health Trust to look into the problem of drink and substance abuse.
The CIF was looking for significant changes in the planning and pricing of projects by clients to assist safety and it was asking public bodies to take the lead.
Safety plans by design teams and the inspection of the design and survey end of projects could be "substantially improved" , Mr McCabe suggested.
Many of the new regulations will be law from January 2002 and will require more than 130,000 workers in the industry to undergo training in safety.