Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

I am delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to the debate on this Bill. I compliment the Minister on showing such alacrity in presenting it. When I was party spokesperson on justice during the last Dáil, a number of times I asked the then Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform to expedite this legislation. We must remember that a Bill similar to this was on the Order Paper in the previous regime. However, despite repeatedly promising it the then Minister never delivered. I am delighted the new Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform has shown such alacrity and he even stated in his remarks that it is one of his major priorities to get it through the House as quickly as possible.

In the first instance we have international conventions to implement and to transpose into our legislation. The introductory section of the Bill makes it clear that the international community has been quite exercised in seeking to put together an international framework for domestic parliaments to take on board. In modern times the earliest one was the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, done at New York as it relates to trafficking in women and children. Also included is the European Council framework decision of July 2002 on combating trafficking in human beings. The more recent ones include the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings done at Warsaw on 16 May 2005. The Council of Europe has a very fine convention on the trafficking of human beings and while it is not included in the reference in the Bill it was included in the Minister's speech.

The first step is to transpose into legislation the framework directives coming from the European Union, the United Nations and the Council of Europe into Irish legislation. The Minister has taken a fairly narrow view in his approach in this regard and deals largely with law enforcement as opposed to human rights. He is specifically criminalising the activity, and seeks to put in place mechanisms to prevent it taking place and investigate it when it does. He has told us that he will deal with the central issues of victims, which is the nub of the question, largely in future immigration, residence and protection legislation that he is due to introduce later. We have been awaiting that Bill for some time and I would like to know when it will appear. Ideally both Bills should have been taken in tandem perhaps with one Bill going through the other House and then transferring to here because the two are intrinsically connected. It is not possible to have law enforcement legislation without dealing with the victims of the criminality.

As has been said repeatedly in this House, human trafficking represents a modern form of slavery with humans, particularly women and children, being exploited — sexual exploitation, particularly in the case of women and children, and labour exploitation in the case of men, women and children. For good measure the Minister has thrown in exploitation relating to organ harvesting, which is a particularly foul activity. However, people are trafficked for that reason also.

The organisation with which I have most contact in my constituency is Ruhama, which has been extremely active in dealing with the issue of prostitution and trafficking. Indeed Ruhama had nothing to do with trafficking until recent years when it found that its work on prostitution was overlapping with its experience of people being trafficked into prostitution here. While it essentially works with the domestic issue of prostitution by trying to help and resource the women caught up in it and for which it has developed a very good policy, it has found this is compounded by the significant numbers of trafficked women it comes across. Since the original United Nations document in 2000, Ruhama has come across more than 200 women who were trafficked into Ireland. Let us remember that Ruhama is a small organisation that only operates in a few areas and is not countrywide. Clearly the numbers it has come across represent the tip of the iceberg and there may be hundreds if not thousands of people who have been trafficked through the country, which gives rise to the belief that there is a considerable criminal fraternity operating on a global basis bringing people across borders into this country to be exploited in the case of the women Ruhama has met, for sexual exploitation and in other cases for labour exploitation and even organ harvesting.

We have been particularly lax in implementing European Union directives that would prevent labour exploitation, including directives on working time and agency workers. Agency workers represent a major bone of contention. People can be brought here under the guise of being agency workers as though it is a legal and normal way to bring people across borders into another jurisdiction. It is very prevalent in this country as Ireland is one of only three countries not to sign up to the European Union directive. When they come here they are subject to exploitation, as they do not have the normal rights and benefits that accrue from domestic legislation. This is a scandal for a country that advises the international community that we have perfected the role of partnership with the trade union movement representing workers, the Government and the business sector coming together in a wonderful social partnership for the benefit of the economy and the community at large. Yet we are allowing this whole category of agency workers to be exploited because we simply will not transpose into Irish law the EU directive on agency workers. This area cannot be neglected and is not covered by this legislation. We need to get that directive through the House and into law as quickly as possible.

The legislation refers to the removal of organs. We have all received letters and other communication from representatives of the Falun Gong, who are often to be seen outside this House. They claim with a certain degree of credibility that some of their members in China have been dealt with in this fashion. When in detention their organs have been removed and sold for large sums of money. We must look carefully at how this practice works and consider whether there are incidents of this happening in Ireland and the strong reports that it is happening in China. Many Chinese who have fled to Ireland are Falun Gong practitioners.

We cannot leave this Bill without commenting on the significant number of victims. The Minister admits that the US figure for global trafficking is 800,000; that at any given time 2.5 million people are in the trafficking-exploitative industry worldwide and that there is transborder activity into 137 countries.

I am not sure if the Minister has responded adequately to human trafficking. We know the Garda National Immigration Bureau is there, but we cannot get a response from it and we do not know how it operates. He referred to NGOs, but the advice from the NGOs was to present this Bill in a different fashion so as to make the victim central to it. While he will bring the NGOs on board, he will not bring them on board in the way they had wanted to come on board. Will he establish the equivalent of the UK human trafficking centre which is working excellently in the UK? We need a place as a focus for dealing with human trafficking and not an attachment to an existing structure like the Garda National Immigration Bureau, GNIB, or a commitment that gardaí will be trained to do it or that he will involve some other agencies and possibly the NGOs. We need a human trafficking centre where resources will be put in place, where we can observe, monitor, scrutinise and audit what is being done to deal with the tragedy of human trafficking.

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