Threats and violence against Dublin City Council staff reported

Awoman hit by a flying shovel, a staff member who claimed they were headbutted by a colleague and soiled nappies dumped in a library were among the accidents and incidents logged by Dublin City Council last year.

The council said it received 337 formal complaint forms from staff in 2023 outlining dangerous incidents or hazards in the workplace.

In one incident in December, a council employee was putting out bins when he was approached, threatened with a knife, then headbutted in the face and suffered a dislocation of his nose.

The same month, a council employee reported an incident where they were driving a work vehicle and “two drunks tried to open [the] passenger door”.

Just a day before, another staff member said they had left a local authority home as the tenant was being “very aggressive towards [their] daughter”.

A log of the complaint said: “For my safety, I decided to leave the premises and was followed by the tenant behaving aggressively towards me.”

In another incident, an employee was driving a tractor up a steep slope when the vehicle slowed and then lost power.

“The tractor rolled backwards at speed, jackknifed and overturned and flipped facing down the hill. Employee emerged from the incident unharmed,” according to the council log.

There were several incidents outside schools, including one where a parent stopped in the middle of the road to allow their children to get out. An account of the incident said: “When driver was approached by the school warden asking her not to stop in the yellow box, she started shouting and screaming at the warden. In the afternoon, the same driver approached and started shouting at the other school warden.”

In October, a different school warden was standing in the middle of the road with their stop sign trying to let children cross when a motorist failed to stop, manoeuvred around them and “tipped a parent’s leg”.

In another incident, a plastic shovel got caught in a breeze and “blew across the road” hitting a woman, before landing in the road where a taxi drove over it.

There were multiple reports of staff getting assaulted, sometimes allegedly by fellow workers. In one incident, an employee said that they were “headbutted by [a] colleague”.

Violence from members of the public was reported, too, with one employee saying they were “punched in the right side of the head”, while another staff member received several “threatening voicemails”.

There were three incidents involving fleas, one where a worker saw “fleas jumping on their leg” while travelling in a council van and two others where staff members reported being bitten while in a house.

Other complaints from employees included dog bites, needlestick injuries, a staff member who narrowly avoided getting hit with a tin of soup thrown from a balcony and a traumatic incident where staff members were “exposed to indecent photos of [a] young child which caused distress to [them]”.