Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Donegal North East, Sinn Fein)

I thank the Tánaiste for his response. The information emerging from North Korea is horrific. Respected international human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea are starting to report the stories of former prisoners and, in some cases, prison wardens who have managed to escape the country. I propose to cite an article published in The Guardian in which a lady who was imprisoned in one of these terrible places recounted her experiences. She states:

There were about 1,000 women in our cabin and we were so squashed together we had to sleep with our legs interlocking. We had rice husks to eat and had to work cutting down trees and dragging the timber back with chains. When it got really cold in winter, five or six women would die every day and the other prisoners would have to carry the bodies out. I still dream about that.

This is an appalling case. The North Korean Government refuses access to such camps, whose existence its denies despite aerial photographs showing they are growing in number. North Korea poses a dilemma in that international organisations are repeatedly obliged to provide food assistance directly to the regime because they cannot abandon the poor people of the country. What action can Ireland take at United Nations and European Union level? What interventions can we make with the North Korean Government to end the abominations and crimes against humanity taking place in that country?

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