Why Engaging With the HSA Matters More Than Ever
On 5 June 2026, the Health and Safety Authority launched a nationwide summer inspection campaign aimed squarely at major outdoor events, including concerts and festivals.
Inspectors are visiting events across the country to check compliance, with particular attention on work at height, traffic management, electrical safety and contractor supervision during the build and break.
Not only did they announce they’d be doing it, they’re doing it too. We’ve met them on numerous sites.
For a lot of promoters and event clients, the word “inspection” still triggers a small jolt of dread. It shouldn’t.
Engaging with the HSA is a normal part of delivering a large-scale outdoor event, and the organisers who treat it as a working relationship rather than a threat are almost always the ones who come through it cleanly.
We have supported clients through this on Wild Lights at Dublin Zoo, on Fleadh Cheoil, and on large concert series for major promoter clients among others.
The pattern is consistent.
Where the planning is sound and the paperwork reflects what is actually happening on site, an HSA visit is a conversation, not an ambush.
What the HSA Actually Does
The HSA is Ireland’s national body for occupational health and safety.
It was established in 1989 and operates under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005. Its remit is workplace safety.
When the HSA looks at your concert or festival, it is looking at it as a workplace. The people building your stage, rigging your lighting, driving your forklifts and dismantling your structures are workers, and the Authority’s job is to make sure they go home safe.
The HSA’s core functions include inspecting places of work, investigating serious accidents and complaints, and publishing guidance and codes of practice. Its inspectors have real statutory powers, but their stated purpose during this campaign is to work with organisers and contractors to raise awareness of hazards and ensure proper controls are in place.
That is worth holding onto when the nerves kick in.
Why Build and Break Are the Focus
Most attendees only ever see the show.
The HSA is far more interested in the days before and after it, because that is where the workplace risk concentrates.
Load-in and load-out are fast, pressured, weather-exposed phases. Heavy structures go up and come down against the clock, often with multiple contractors working in the same space, sometimes alongside members of the public who are already arriving or still leaving.
The HSA has explicitly identified these phases as high-risk, which is why this summer’s campaign targets them directly.
The specific areas inspectors are assessing in 2026 are:
- Work at height: rigging, towers, stage roofs, delay towers and access equipment.
- Traffic management: the interaction of vehicles, plant and people on a busy site.
- Electrical safety: temporary power distribution, generators and cabling.
- Contractor supervision: who is competent, who is in charge, and how that is being monitored.
- Safe use of work equipment: forklifts, telehandlers, MEWPs and lifting gear.
(Click on any of the areas above and you’ll be taken to a Practical Guide on each of them that we have developed. They should help you stay on top of each area.)
If you know that list, you already know what an inspector will gravitate toward when they walk your site.
There are no real surprises in it.
We’ve already dealt with inspections on sites this Summer on behalf of clients.
Already on sites this Summer, we’ve seen inspectors focus on the ‘contractor supervision’ piece in particular.
Engaging Early Is The Single Best Thing You Can Do
The organisers who fear the HSA most are usually the ones who only meet them on inspection day. The ones who have nothing to fear have often been in contact long before that.
Proactive engagement does not mean inviting scrutiny. It means doing the things that make scrutiny straightforward.
For a large outdoor event series, that starts with treating your build as what it legally is i.e. a construction project. The build and break phases of a major event sit under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (Construction) Regulations 2013, and those regulations carry specific duties that many event clients do not realise apply to them. Sound Event Safety planning is what gets you ahead of all of it.
We go further than most would expect, and we suggest you do too.
Invite the HSA in.
Rather than waiting to see whether an inspector arrives, there is real value in making contact ahead of your build, being open about what you are putting up, how long it will take, and how you intend to manage the contractors on site. On the right project, that can mean asking the inspector to visit during the build itself.
We engaged with a HSA inspector in 2025 on a particular event. They expressed an interest in being on site in the future when there is significant crane activity. Just today, Conor on our team informed them of the scheduled crane day this year. They’ve been invited to attend.
Separately, we are in the planning stages of a very large build and break project for an event in Ireland next year for which we will be PSCS. The discussion with the client around engaging with the HSA was a short one. They are of the exact same mind as us.
An organiser who picks up the phone, explains an unusual structure or a tight programme, and walks an inspector through the plan is signalling that safety is being managed rather than hidden.
The HSA has said plainly that it wants to work with organisers and contractors, and openness is how you take them up on that. You’re not handing them a stick to beat you with, you’re showing them a site that’s under control, which is exactly what they hope to find.
Appointing your duty holders
Under the Construction Regulations, the client must appoint, in writing, a Project Supervisor Design Process (PSDP) before design work starts and a Project Supervisor Construction Stage (PSCS) before construction begins.
On an event, the build is the construction. These are not optional roles, and getting them appointed early is the foundation of a defensible position.
This is the point many promoters miss. You think of yourself as running a concert, so it does not occur to you that, in the eyes of the law, you are also running a construction site, with all the duties that carries. That realisation can feel like a burden landing on top of an already full plate.
It does not have to sit with you. We can take on the construction-site responsibility on your behalf, acting as PSDP, PSCS, or both, so the statutory duty holder is a competent safety specialist rather than a promoter trying to learn the Construction Regulations during their busiest week of the year.
You keep control of your event. We carry the part of it that is, legally, a building site.
Where a project will last longer than 30 working days, or exceed 500 person-days of work, it must be notified to the HSA in advance on the AF1 form.
A major festival build often comfortably crosses those thresholds. That notification is not a red flag to the Authority. It is exactly what they expect to see on a project of any scale.
Getting your documentation to match reality
A Risk Assessment that sits in a drawer and never changes is worse than useless, because it actively misrepresents your site. The single most common gap we see is documentation that describes an event as planned in February against a site that has evolved by August. Inspectors notice that immediately.
Your Event Safety Plan, your construction stage safety and health plan, and your method statements need to describe what is genuinely happening on site, by whom, and under whose supervision. When they do, an inspection becomes a process of confirming what you already know.
What Happens During an HSA Inspection
An inspection follows a fairly predictable shape, and knowing it removes most of the anxiety.
The inspector will seek out the most senior person in charge on site and explain the nature of the visit. They will then ask to meet your Safety Advisor and any safety representative who is in place. Early on, they will review your safety documentation, including the Safety Statement and the relevant safety and health plan or Construction Phase Safety Plan.
From there, the questions are tailored to the person being asked. A senior manager will be asked about how safety is organised and monitored across the project. A supervisor will be asked about the specific work in front of them. The inspector is testing whether the people on site actually understand their responsibilities, not just whether the right document exists somewhere in a folder.
The most useful mindset is openness.
Inspectors respond well to organisers who walk them through the site honestly, including the parts that are still being worked on. Defensiveness makes an inspector wonder what you’re hiding, whereas walking them through it openly reads as competence.
Reports, Notices and What They Mean
People fear inspection outcomes largely because they do not know what the outcomes actually are. There are three you should understand.
A Report of Inspection is the standard written record of an inspector’s visit. It sets out the findings, identifies anything that needs improvement, and can include advice. Most inspections end here, with a list of things to tighten up rather than any formal enforcement.
An Improvement Notice is issued when the inspector identifies a breach of safety legislation. It sets out what is wrong and specifies a date by which you must put it right. It is serious, but it is fixable, and work can continue while you do. If you disagree with it, you can appeal to the District Court within 14 days.
A Prohibition Notice is the one that stops work. It is issued when an activity poses a risk of serious personal injury, and it takes effect immediately. The named activity must stop until the risk is resolved. You can appeal it to the District Court within 14 days, but unlike an Improvement Notice, the prohibition stays in force while that appeal is heard.
On a live event build against a hard show date, a prohibition notice is the outcome everyone wants to avoid, and almost all of the preparation described above exists to make sure it never arrives.
None of these are punishments handed down from on high. They are the mechanism through which the law expects a workplace to be brought into line, and they are entirely survivable when you respond properly.
Lessons From the Ground
On Wild Lights at Dublin Zoo, the value of proactive engagement shows up every season. The event runs in a sensitive, occupied site with a long build, and we test our plans nightly during operation rather than assuming the February version still holds. That habit of keeping the live picture current is exactly what an inspector is looking for.
Lesson learned: the documentation is not the deliverable. The safe site is the deliverable, and the documentation has to describe it accurately.
On large concert builds for major promoter clients, the recurring theme is contractor coordination. A festival site can have a dozen contractors working at once, and the HSA’s focus on contractor supervision reflects how often that is where things slip. Clear lines of competence and supervision, written down and actually followed, are what turn a chaotic-looking site into a defensible one.
A recent inspection brought that home. On a temporary event site, a fire broke out in a trash compactor (thanks for nothing, vapes!). The HSA attended, and the first things the inspector asked to see were the RAMS (the Risk Assessment and Method Statement) for the compactor operation and the inspection and maintenance logs for the equipment itself. Not the headline safety plan, but the working documents that prove the kit was checked and the task was risk assessed.
We found the inspector to be reasonable, approachable and practical throughout. Engaging in the way we would always recommend i.e. openly and without defensiveness helped. We provided the incident report, talked the inspector through our processes, and gave a clear picture of how the site was being run. It went well, precisely because the evidence was there and the conversation was straight.
Lesson learned: when something goes wrong, the inspector reaches straight for the evidence trail. If your RAMS and your equipment logs are current and you can put your hand on them, an incident becomes a managed event rather than a crisis. If they’re missing or out of date, you’ve got a much bigger problem than the incident itself.
The Companion Reference Worth Reading
For the full statutory detail, go to the HSA’s own guidance on the Project Supervisor Construction Stage role, which spells out duty holder responsibilities under the Construction Regulations 2013. It is written for clients, designers, project supervisors and contractors, and it tells each party what they must do.
This article is a companion to that guidance, not a substitute for it.
Where we aim to take the fear out of engagement and explain how it works in practice on an event, the HSA’s guidance gives you the precise legal architecture underneath it.
Read both.
Bringing It Together
Engaging with the HSA is not a test you pass or fail on the day. It’s what happens naturally when you run the build properly: competent people, clear supervision, and documentation that’s honest about what’s on site.
The promoters and clients we support stop fearing inspections once they see that the inspector and the organiser want the same thing.
A safe site that delivers a safe show.
If you would like help getting your build and break onto that footing, get in touch. It is a large part of what we do.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to contact the HSA before my event?
Not always, but where your build qualifies as a notifiable construction project, it must be. If the work will last more than 30 working days or exceed 500 person-days, the project must be notified to the HSA in advance on the AF1 form. Most large festival and concert builds cross that threshold, and notifying signals competence rather than inviting trouble.
What is the HSA looking for at a concert or festival?
It treats your event as a workplace and focuses on the build and break phases. In 2026 the priority areas are work at height, traffic management, electrical safety, contractor supervision and the safe use of work equipment. If your documentation and your site match on those points, you are in good shape.
What happens if the HSA finds a problem during the build?
It depends on severity. A minor issue may simply be recorded in a report of the inspector’s visit, with advice on what to improve. A breach of legislation can result in an Improvement Notice, which sets a date to fix the problem while work continues. A risk of serious personal injury can result in a Prohibition Notice that stops the activity immediately until it is resolved. Both notice types can be appealed to the District Court within 14 days.
Does engaging with the HSA make an inspection more likely?
No. Notifying the HSA where required is a legal duty, and meeting it does not increase your exposure. What proactive engagement does is ensure that, when an inspection happens, the inspector finds a well-run site rather than a scramble. Engagement reduces risk, it does not create it.
Who should deal with the inspector on site?
The most senior person in charge at the time, supported by your Safety Advisor and any safety representative. The inspector will tailor questions to each person’s role, so everyone with safety responsibilities should understand their own duties. Briefing your team in advance on who speaks to what is well worth doing.