John Traynor

John Traynor was a workman and toolmaker from Ballycastle, on the north Antrim coast of Northern Ireland, who died in January 2022 after a workplace accident on Knockagh Road, in the hills above Carrickfergus, County Antrim. He was 41 years old. He is not to be confused with other people who share his name, including the Dublin born criminal known as "the Coach" or any of the footballers, artists and professionals also called John Traynor who have no connection to him.

Mr Traynor was working on a hillside site in a steep and remote area north of Newtownabbey, in terrain linked by a local MLA to a project connected to Northern Ireland Water infrastructure, when the accident happened shortly after 9am on a Wednesday morning. Despite the efforts of paramedics, police and the air ambulance, he died at the scene. It was reported at the time that he had become trapped under heavy machinery, with some accounts suggesting a dumper truck or similar heavy vehicle had slid on muddy, sloping ground, although the precise circumstances were not fully confirmed in public in the immediate aftermath.

He was remembered by family and the wider Ballycastle community as a popular and well liked man. At his funeral at St Patrick's and St Brigid's Church in Ballycastle, mourners were told he was <cite index="2-1">a good and gentle man who had lived life to the full</cite>. Tributes read on behalf of his children described a man who was thoughtful, hardworking and quick to make people laugh, and the priest leading the service told those gathered that the family's life had changed completely in an instant.

John Traynor was due to be married that summer to his fiancee Ann, a wedding that had already been postponed twice because of the Covid pandemic. He was a father of two, Caitlin and John, and was predeceased by his father George and by his brother Gerald, who had died of cancer two years earlier. He was survived by his mother Mary and his siblings Bernie, Alison, Catherine and Rosemary.

More than four years after his death, on 2 October 2026, a court case concluded with a groundwork company and a construction company being fined a combined 145,000 pounds in connection with the circumstances of his death on the site. The prosecution followed a health and safety investigation into the fatal incident, a process that in similar fatal workplace cases elsewhere in the UK and Ireland has typically taken several years to reach sentencing.