Refugee workers ‘forced to live on bread and brown sauce’

REFUGEES are being paid as little as €1 to pick stones for farmers and some are being fed on bread and brown sauce, a priest said yesterday.

Fr Willie Purcell wrote to the Department of Justice three times about the matter but hasn’t received one response. The Kilkenny priest added that other unscrupulous employers are also taking advantage of the fear among the non-national community for their own benefit.

The situation in the South East is by no means confined to that one region, he added, and complaints of similar abuses across the country are flooding in.

A recent spot-check by Fr Purcell uncovered several abuses of migrant workers in conditions which he said amounted to nothing short of modern-day slavery.

While there are many good employers out there, he said, others are simply abusing the system.

In a separate case, he said a file has been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) after an alleged serious sexual assault in the on a female refugee.

Her employer is alleged to have told her that she would be deported if she said anything to the authorities about the attack in the workplace.

“We later moved her to Dublin because of genuine fears of intimidation. It has come to light that many non-nationals in Kilkenny are being exploited in a way that has led to a new form of slavery,” Fr Purcell, director of Dochas, the diocesan outreach service to refugees, has said.

“They are going underground because they simply can’t survive on €19.50 a week and send money back home to their families.

“By not allowing them to work, we are aiding and abetting these difficult situations people going underground find themselves in. If we were to allow them to work, their rights and entitlements would be protected and this abuse would stop,” Fr Purcell said.

A Department of Justice spokesman said they had looked at their correspondence and could find no record of the letters sent during Anti-Racism Week last year and again in September.

“If they were received, and we can’t at this point confirm if they were or were not, such matters would be sent on to the Minster for Enterprise. But it would be standard practice to write back to the author, telling them what was being done,” the department’s spokesman added.

Fr Purcell said he would be sending another letter on Tuesday and was anticipating a reply.