A big night at the Health & Safety Excellence Awards
The Health & Safety Excellence Awards 2026 took place the week before last, and we came away with the Health & Safety Excellence Award for Tourism & Entertainment for our work on Wild Lights at Dublin Zoo.
They took place on the night of 30th April. It was the same week as the Punchestown Festival on which we were working, so I was the only one able to attend on our behalf.
We were also finalists in two further categories on the night: Best Use of Technology, for our Bespoke Digital Operations work, and Health & Safety Team of the Year, for our Operations Team.
Winning our category also meant we were in contention for the night’s overall Grand Prix. We didn’t take that one home, but the nomination is one we are quite happy with.
How it started: a pitch to Emma and Aoife in 2017
Wild Lights wasn’t yet Wild Lights when we first sat down with Dublin Zoo. The Zoo’s marketing and events team at the time, Emma and Aoife, were running a competitive process to find a safety partner for what would be the inaugural event in 2017.
I went in to pitch with a colleague. We came out of the room and said to each other that we just suited the Zoo better than the others we knew were in the running. We were right. That same day, Aoife emailed to say they wanted to work with us.
That was 10 years ago. Wild Lights now welcomes up to 300,000 visitors annually across 60+ show nights, and we have been the event and event safety partner since night one.
What 10 years has actually looked like: i5 at Wild Lights at Dublin Zoo
We talk about our approach as i5.
Five things, all starting with i: Immerse, Imagine, Iterate, Integrate, Implement.
It is the framework we use on every project. The 10 years on Wild Lights is, looking back, as clean a demonstration of i5 as we have anywhere.
Immerse. A working zoo, after dark, in winter, with families. There is no off-the-shelf safety plan for that. Our involvement started with months of immersion in the Zoo’s operations, including animal welfare considerations, the working rhythm of zookeepers, the visitor experience the Zoo wanted to deliver, the lighting installation cycle. None of that work shows on the final Risk Assessment, but all of it shapes it.
Imagine. A walk-through Chinese lantern festival inside a live zoo arrives with no playbook. We imagined our way through the questions nobody else had answered, like emergency planning for a mostly-darkened site, lost child protocols that work where the obvious landmarks are themselves animated lantern displays, ingress and egress that respects the animals and prioritises their welfare.
Iterate. 10 seasons, 60+ show nights each, on the same site, with the same plans tested in the same conditions. That kind of repeated run is rare and very useful. We test our emergency response protocols nightly on Wild Lights. That’s hundreds of test cycles, on the same site, against the same plans. The plans we work to today are not last year’s plans copied forward. They are last year’s plans tested, broken, and rebuilt.
Integrate. By the time Wild Lights opens each year, we are part of the Zoo’s delivery team. The Zoo’s people and our Crowd Safety specialists answer the same radio calls.
Implement. Delivery is the test of the other four. We are on site for the construction, every show night, and the final break. Tactical command, on-the-night decisions, the stewarding strategy actually landing on the ground. Wild Lights has been testing our implementation 60+ nights a year, every year, since 2017.
Dessie Brosnan has been the Project Manager in here for Wild Lights for several years now and had this to say about the accolade and the work:
Wild Lights in the Zoo is the same but wildly different each and every year. From the outside it might look like ‘rinse and repeat’ but, as event people will appreciate, it’s far from that. Especially this gig in particular. The Zoo has changed. Our approaches have changed. Personnel have changed. Challenges have changed. It’s always changing and always improving. It’s lovely for our team to be recognised for what we do alongside the Zoo team, especially as we are preparing for the 10th year of Wild Lights.
Two more nominations to acknowledge
Wild Lights took home the trophy, but we were genuinely proud of the two further finalist nods.
Best Use of Technology shortlisted our Bespoke Digital Operations work. These are the platforms we have built in-house for inductions, compliance, document control, and incident reporting. They started life as internal tooling to support our teams on the ground and they now support clients well beyond Wild Lights.
Health & Safety Team of the Year shortlisted our Operations Team. It’s a difficult category to land in, given the calibre of the wider field. Especially considering the size and scale of some of their teams, so being in that conversation matters to us.
To Dublin Zoo, and to our team
A first-of-its-kind event in 2017, now one of Ireland’s most-loved seasonal experiences.
We’re grateful to Dublin Zoo for 10 years of partnership, and to every member of our team, full-time and freelance, who has stewarded a show night, audited a plan, or made a tactical call in a tricky moment over the last decade.
Planning for the next Wild Lights season is already underway. We will be back to win and lose at next year’s awards too, no doubt.
If you’d like to talk to us about Crowd and Event Safety on a project of your own, get in touch.