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.