Dark side of the tiger exposed

WE have seen the gaping schism of Irish society. Tánaiste Mary Harney stands up and says that, yes, the treatment of the Gama workers was a disgrace but it had nothing to do with me, gov.

The sentiment that stood out from a Dáil speech that disowned all responsibility for the scandal was this: her job was to “encourage investment in this country anywhere I went”.

But somewhere in the northside of the Irish political landscape, another figure was speaking out. Smartass commentators make snide comments when Joe Higgins describes himself as leader of the Socialist Party.

For in truth, he leads a party of one in the Dáil. But this one-man band carries more pack and punch than any other opposition TD in Irish politics. On February 8, Higgins stood up in the Dáil and made what seemed like a fantastical claim: that Turkish workers employed by Gama were being paid as little as €2 an hour.

Aside from a smattering of independents, Higgins got no support or sympathy. Others in the Dáil dismissed it as Higgins hyperbole. With most other politicians, the whole thing would have fizzled out. But Higgins is a peculiarity in Irish politics. There are perhaps only a dozen TDs in the Dáil - Michael McDowell is another - whose political outlook has remained so wholly consistent over the years and decades. Sure he has been opportunistic, and agitpropping on water and bin charges has raised the profile of him and his party. But the driven nature of the man, and of his core political beliefs, have to be admired.

His campaign started simply enough, when he took the bother of translating the rights of workers into Turkish and distributing them to Gama workers, who in turn, approached him with a tale that was shocking and incredible in its import. “This State is deeply shamed,” he said in the Dáil on Tuesday, “that fathers who came here to support their families, leaving spouses and young children behind, and brothers and sons who came to work for their families’ welfare should be most criminally abused, exploited and duped in the course of construction of the Celtic tiger infrastructure.”

And this is the fault-line, the schism. The Tánaiste’s brief was to encourage investment and jobs in Ireland. But an integral part of her brief as Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment was the employment bit at the end. It was to protect workers from the such torrid exploitation.

Yes, in the Dáil on Thursday she said it was a disgrace and she would not stand over it. But she spoke about it in the abstract, as if this was somehow at a remove from her brief. She did launch two investigations in her department into allegations against Gama for exploitation of migrant workers. But both gave the construction company a clean bill of health.

The documents she released on the first investigation were hardly a roaring indictment: “We operate on the basis that important National Development Plan infrastructure projects should not be delayed due to lack of suitable labour and we have been granting permits liberally and quickly to ensure that contracts for those projects are delivered on time.”

As for the ‘investigation’, it does violence to the term. The official informs Harney that the department has had no problem with Gama’s compliance.

It goes on. Allegations emanate from the bricklayers union, and are related to an inter-union dispute. The complaint is dismissed as a “letter-writing campaign”. As is an earlier complaint from a rival company that was underbid by Gama.

What is clear is that protection of foreign workers was a low priority for a department keen to get NDP projects to completion zippily.

Knowing what we do now, the investigations were whitewashes that compare to the one where Dermot Ahern climbed every tree in North Dublin and found nothing dicky about Ray Burke.

Harney will face flak for refusing to bolster the strength of the labour inspectorate - she agreed to only four extra inspectors last summer, even though money was there for eight.

The uncomfortable truth is that a well-resourced and powerful government department (and its minister) abjectly failed to uncover a scandal and rip-off that had been ongoing for five years.

It was left to a one-person Dáil party who dug his hand into his own pocket to provide flights, beds and bus fares for the workers.

In so doing, he gave us a glimpse of a dark side of our tiger economy.