Irish Examiner view: Today’s 40m slaves

Irish-Romanian people-smuggling gang ringleaders jailed

Folice and forensic officers at the Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, Essex, after 39 bodies of Vietnamese migrants were found inside the lorry on the industrial estate. File picture

Less than two years ago UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) pubished figures suggesting that an estimated 40.3m people – more than three times the figure during the transatlantic slave trade – are living in some form of modern slavery. Women or girls comprise 71% of all today's captive workers. Children make up 25% and account for 10m of all slaves.

These figures are so shocking, those lives are so awful that they hardly bear contemplation. They also provoke a natural reaction to such horrors - a pretence that such abuses have nothing to do with our world.

Yesterday's sentencing of the three ringleaders of an Irish-Romanian people-smuggling gang undermined that defence. Those men were responsible for the deaths of 39 Vietnamese people who suffocated in a refrigeration container. They received prison sentences of 27 and 20 years.

Without criminals like these today's slave markets cannot survive and those who enslave, in whatever form, are stymied.