‘Lawyers’ advice must support wind safety’
As 2030 looms ever closer, Ireland's ambitious offshore wind target of 7 GW installed capacity has been buffered by a series of setbacks, and a drastic acceleration will be needed in order to realise the 2050 target of 30 GW, write Jason Milne and Nessa Boland of William Fry.
The promise of clean energy, economic growth, and climate leadership is undeniable.
Yet beneath the promise lies a sobering reality: offshore wind remains one of the most hazardous working environments in the renewable-energy sector.
The tragic loss of eight crew members when the Cemfjord sank off the coast of Scotland in 2015, a fatal marine accident onboard the FV Séimi in February 2023, when a crew member was dragged overboard, and numerous near-miss events across European waters all serve as stark reminders that the margin for error in offshore operations is almost nil.
In an industry where workers routinely face extreme weather conditions, challenging sea states, work at height, confined spaces and complex lifting operations, often simultaneously, the legal and moral imperative for robust health-and-safety governance has never been more pressing.
Ireland is uniquely positioned to harness the potential of offshore wind energy.
Scaling up offshore wind capacity, however, means more than erecting turbines, building offshore substations, and laying cables; it means building an entirely new offshore workforce, establishing maritime-safety protocols for operations in some of the most challenging waters, and creating a regulatory framework that is sufficiently robust to address the full gamut of risks emerging from evolving technologies.
Hamburg Declaration
In January 2026, Ireland, as a signatory to the non-binding Hamburg Declaration, alongside Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Britain, signalled its commitment to regional co-operation to develop offshore wind capacity in the North Sea region.
The declaration recognises improving the availability of skilled workforce in this sector as a key objective in strengthening its resilience.
While this development may bolster confidence to unlock investment in offshore energy, the need to cultivate a safety culture is ever greater in this increasingly interconnected landscape.
This article examines the current legal framework, identifies key risks and emerging challenges, and offers practical guidance for ensuring that Ireland's offshore wind ambitions are built on a foundation of safety excellence.
The legal and regulatory framework
Health-and-safety regulation in Ireland's offshore wind sector operates at the intersection of multiple legal regimes, a complexity that reflects the unique nature of offshore operations straddling both maritime and industrial safety domains.
The cornerstone of occupational health and safety law in Ireland remains the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, as amended.
This framework legislation establishes the fundamental duty of care owed by employers and those in control of workplaces, requiring them to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the safety, health, and welfare of employees and others affected by their undertaking.
The 2005 act applies comprehensively to offshore wind operations, from construction vessels to the turbines themselves.
The Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (Construction) Regulations 2013, as amended, aim to protect the safety, health and welfare of people on construction sites and give effect to EU directives on minimum safety and health requirements.
They apply to all parties involved in construction, including clients, designers, contractors and employees.
The regulations set out requirements for the entire construction process, from the design phase through to demolition and specific site conditions.
The Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations 2007, as amended, provide detailed prescriptive requirements across numerous workplace hazards highly relevant to offshore wind: work at height, confined spaces, manual handling, personal protective equipment and electrical safety, among others.
These regulations translate broad statutory duties into specific, enforceable standards.
The Health and Safety Authority (HSA) serves as Ireland's national workplace safety regulator.
The HSA's jurisdiction extends to offshore renewable energy installations within Ireland's territorial waters and, significantly, to installations on the Irish continental shelf pursuant to the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (Offshore Installations) Act 1987 and associated regulations.
This extended jurisdiction is particularly relevant as Ireland's offshore wind ambitions push developments further from shore into deeper waters.
Maritime safety overlay
The maritime dimension introduces additional regulatory layers. The Maritime Area Planning Act 2021 fundamentally reformed Ireland's marine spatial planning regime and established Maritime Area Regulatory Authority (MARA) as the consent authority for certain regulatory aspects of offshore renewable energy projects.
While MARA's primary focus concerns planning and environmental consents, maritime safety considerations permeate the consenting process, particularly regarding navigational safety and interaction with other sea users.
The Irish Maritime Administration within the Department of Transport retains responsibility for vessel safety, crew competency certification and maritime casualty investigation.
Offshore wind vessels operating in Irish waters must comply with the Merchant Shipping Acts and associated regulations governing vessel construction, manning, safety equipment and operational procedures.
The Merchant Shipping (Investigation of Marine Accidents) Act 2025 establishes a full-time Marine Accident Investigation Unit (MAIU) and updates safety obligations for offshore service vessels.
The EU Offshore Safety Directive (2013/30/EU), while primarily focused on oil and gas operations, establishes principles relevant to offshore renewable energy, particularly regarding major accident prevention, emergency response and the role of independent verification.
Although not directly transposed for wind-energy installations in Ireland to date, the directive's safety-management system approach increasingly influences industry thinking and may shape future regulatory developments.
Key health-and-safety risks
Offshore wind operations present a distinctive and demanding risk profile that differentiates them markedly from onshore renewable energy projects or traditional maritime activities.
Construction-phase hazards
The construction phase represents perhaps the highest-risk period in a project's lifecycle.
Heavy lifting operations involving massive turbine components, of which individual blades can exceed 80 meters in length and weigh 30 tonnes, in exposed marine environments create significant crane operation and load control risks.
Dropped objects from height pose catastrophic hazards both to workers and to vessels below.
Working at height will happen throughout construction: pile driving operations, turbine assembly, nacelle installation and blade mounting all occur at substantial elevations in conditions far more challenging than land-based equivalents.
Fall-protection systems, edge protection, and rescue procedures take on heightened importance when a fall would likely result in entry into cold waters rather than onto solid ground.
Jack-up vessels and heavy lift vessels themselves present confined space risks, pinch point hazards, and the ever-present danger of vessel instability.
The 2017 incident involving the jack-up vessel Sea Installer off Liverpool, which experienced rapid leg penetration into the seabed, causing severe vessel tilt during operations, demonstrated how quickly offshore conditions can create life-threatening scenarios.
Vessel-transfer operations
Crew-transfer vessel (CTV) operations represent a particularly high-risk activity in offshore wind.
Workers must regularly transfer from CTVs to turbine foundations or offshore substations via transfer gangways or boat landings, often in challenging sea states.
This ‘personnel transfer zone’ is consistently identified as a major accident risk area in offshore wind safety studies.
The motion of vessels in waves, the potential for crushing between vessel and structure, the risk of persons falling into the sea and the limited rescue options if something goes wrong make vessel transfers exceptionally hazardous.
Weather windows for safe transfer may be brief, creating operational pressure that can lead to risk-taking.
Operations and maintenance challenges
Once constructed, offshore wind farms enter decades-long operational phases requiring regular maintenance, both planned and reactive.
O&M personnel sometimes face extended periods working in isolated offshore environments, often in small teams with limited immediate rescue capability.
However, for the Phase 1 east-coast projects, this should not be an issue given their proximity to land.
Electrical safety is paramount: technicians work with high-voltage equipment, both within turbines and at offshore substations. Arc flash risks, electrical shock hazards and the potential for electrical fires in offshore environments demand rigorous lockout/tagout procedures and emergency response planning.
Mechanical hazards abound: rotating turbine components, hydraulic systems operating under extreme pressure and the confined spaces within turbine towers and nacelles create multiple pinch point and entrapment risks.
The confined nature of offshore work environments exacerbates these hazards; escape routes are limited and emergency services are rarely within close proximity.
The maritime environment itself constitutes a particular hazard. Hypothermia risk from cold water immersion, fatigue from vessel motion and extended shifts, heat stress within enclosed turbine spaces, and the psychological challenges of offshore isolation all impact worker health and safety.
Weather forecasting limitations mean that conditions can deteriorate rapidly, potentially stranding workers offshore or complicating emergency evacuation.
Emerging challenges
As Ireland upscales from small-scale demonstration projects to gigawatt-scale offshore wind farms, developers, contractors, and practitioners operating in health and safety sectors must turn their attention to emerging challenges.
Workforce competence and the skills gap
Ireland's offshore wind sector must rapidly develop a substantial skilled workforce, yet offshore wind-specific training and competency standards are still maturing.
The Global Wind Organisation (GWO) has established widely-recognised training standards covering working at height, sea survival, first aid, fire awareness and manual handling. However, ensuring comprehensive uptake of GWO training and supplementing it with project-specific requirements will be challenging.
The temptation to rapidly scale up by drawing workers from adjacent industries, such as construction, onshore wind and oil and gas, introduces risks if offshore-specific competencies are not adequately addressed.
A construction worker experienced in high-rise projects may have excellent working-at-height skills, yet lack understanding of sea survival, vessel behaviour or the unique emergency response limitations in offshore environments.
From a legal perspective, employers' duties under section 8 of the 2005 act (i.e. to provide appropriate training and instruction) take on heightened significance in this context.
Demonstrating "reasonable practicability" in risk mitigation necessarily includes ensuring workforce competency is genuinely fit for purpose.
Contractor management and multi-party complexity
Offshore wind projects involve extraordinarily complex contractor hierarchies: developers, engineering procurement and construction contractors, sub-contractors, vessel operators, specialist technicians, and certification bodies often operate simultaneously on single projects.
Each brings its own safety culture, procedures and risk tolerances.
The legislation anticipates such complexity through provisions addressing duties of multiple contractors sharing workplaces, the duty of the Project Supervisor Construction Stage (PSCS) in that context (article 17 of the Construction Regulations) and co-ordination requirements.
However, practical implementation offshore (i.e. where multiple contractors' workers may be on the same installation, relying on shared evacuation systems and exposed to each other's operations) demands sophisticated safety co-ordination arrangements far exceeding minimum legal requirements.
Main contractor duties (i.e. PSCS) require clear allocation of co-ordination responsibility, authority, and accountability.
Interface management between marine and construction activities, for instance, during blade installation where vessel operations, crane operations and work at height intersect, represents a particularly critical challenge.
Technological integration and emergency response
Emerging technologies promise enhanced safety outcomes but also introduce unprecedented risks requiring updated risk assessments and controls.
Service Operation Vessels with walk-to-work gangway systems reduce vessel transfer risks in certain conditions but introduce new risks relating to motion compensation system failure.
The push toward larger turbines has rendered working environments substantially different from previous generations.
Ireland's offshore wind ambitions will test emergency-response capabilities.
Search-and-rescue helicopter coverage, coastguard response capabilities and maritime medical evacuation infrastructure were not designed to cater for large offshore workforces.
As worker numbers increase, strain on existing emergency response systems could occur.
Questions about emergency-response preparedness engage multiple legal dimensions: employer duties to provide emergency response capabilities, co-ordination with public emergency services, and potentially novel questions about responsibility for establishing or funding enhanced emergency infrastructure to support industry activities.
Building a safety culture
For developers, contractors and legal professionals navigating this complex landscape, several practical approaches can enhance legal compliance and facilitate genuine safety outcomes.
Embrace goal-setting regulation with procedural rigour
The 2005 act framework is intentionally goal-setting rather than prescriptive: it requires safety "so far as is reasonably practicable" rather than mandating specific engineering controls for every scenario.
This flexibility is valuable in offshore wind's rapidly evolving technological environment, but it places a significant burden on duty holders to demonstrate they have systematically identified hazards, assessed risks and implemented appropriate controls.
Comprehensive Safety Management Systems (SMS) that document risk assessment methodologies, operational procedures, emergency response plans, training matrices and audit processes are not merely good practice, they are practical evidence demonstrating compliance with legal obligations.
For developers, investment in robust SMS development and implementation at the outset provides both operational benefits and defensibility in regulatory engagement.
Prioritise verification and independent assurance
Independent verification of offshore safety-critical systems (i.e. structural integrity, lifting equipment, electrical protection systems, emergency evacuation equipment) should be standard practice.
While not always legally mandated for wind installations as it is in oil and gas under the Offshore Safety Directive, independent verification provides essential assurance that duty holders' assessments and controls are adequate.
For legal professionals advising on contracting strategies, allocation of verification responsibilities and ensuring verification scope is genuinely independent (i.e. not subordinated to production or cost pressures) represents an important protective mechanism.
Learn selectively from adjacent industries
Offshore wind need not re-invent offshore safety. The oil and gas industry's hard-won lessons regarding permit-to-work systems, simultaneous operations management, emergency response planning and safety case regimes offer valuable insights.
The offshore construction industry's experience with heavy lifting, working at height and vessel operations similarly provides applicable learning.
However, uncritical transplantation is inappropriate: wind operations differ substantially from oil and gas in operational profile, hazard types, workforce size and distribution, and economic constraints. The key is selective adaptation rather than wholesale adoption.
Engage proactively with regulators
Early and sustained engagement with the HSA regarding project-specific safety approaches, particularly for novel technologies or operational approaches, is advisable.
The HSA's role is not limited to enforcement following incidents – the authority provides guidance, facilitates industry dialogue and can offer regulatory clarity before, rather than after, investments are made.
Similarly, developers and organisations should consider the Maritime Navigation Safety Guidance & Emergency Response document for Offshore Renewable Energy Installations (OREI) prepared by the Department of Transport, and engage if necessary.
Foster genuine safety culture
Ultimately, organisations should strive to go beyond baseline legal compliance.
Offshore wind's safety record will depend fundamentally on whether organisations cultivate authentic safety cultures where workers feel empowered to stop work when concerned, where near-miss reporting is encouraged rather than punished, and where safety considerations genuinely influence decision-making, including production and financial decisions.
This wholesale ‘safety culture’ concept, emphasised by regulators following major incidents across industries, proves easier to articulate than to embed.
It requires leadership commitment, resource allocation, systemic attention to human factors and organisational learning, and patience to build trust.
For lawyers drafting operational agreements and joint venture terms, provisions addressing safety governance, incentive structures that reward safety performance and dispute resolution mechanisms for safety disagreements can support cultural development.
The evolving legal landscape
Ireland's offshore-wind safety regulatory framework will inevitably evolve to match industry expansion.
The HSA has indicated interest in developing offshore wind-specific guidance, potentially drawing on international standards and EU member state approaches.
Whether this might eventually culminate in dedicated regulations specifically addressing offshore renewables, analogous to the Offshore Installations regime, remains uncertain but possible, particularly following any serious incident that focuses regulatory attention.
International developments will also influence Irish practice. Britain, with its vastly larger offshore wind deployment, continues to refine its regulatory approach, while European standardisation efforts through CEN/CENELEC technical committees produce standards increasingly relevant to demonstrating compliance with legal duties.
CEN is the European Committee for Standardisation which (together with CENELEC) has been officially recognised by the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) as being responsible for developing and defining voluntary standards at European level.
Building sustainably, operating safely
Ireland's offshore wind ambitions represent a transformative opportunity for climate action, energy security and economic development.
Harnessing this potential in a safe and sustainable manner is not merely a legal obligation but a moral and practical imperative.
For developers, the message is clear: safety excellence is not a constraint on project delivery but rather an essential enabler.
Projects that prioritise progression without adequately embedding safety measures will ultimately face greater delays, higher costs and reputational damage than those that invest appropriately from the outset.
For contractors, particularly those new to offshore environments, humility regarding the learning curve and willingness to adopt industry-leading practices will serve better than attempts to simply transplant onshore approaches offshore.