Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The newspaper outlined how in Qatar, 1,200 workers have been killed so far in the past two years in the death trap construction projects in preparation for the 2022 football World Cup. Amnesty International has reported a scandalous regime of the most grotesque abuse of migrant workers. The journalist who wrote yesterday's piece in the Irish Daily Mirror, Kevin Maguire, visited Qatar, like the Taoiseach, except that he went to see the reality on the ground and found the most squalid labour camps, where construction workers are forced to live in the most disgusting of conditions, some with no running water and open sewers. These are conditions that would have whoever was responsible sent to jail if they were housing animals in them, and rightly so. Amnesty International has found workers in the construction projects on 68 cent an hour, sometimes going unpaid for months, physically beaten and their passports taken by gangmasters so that they are made prisoners in Qatar.

I do not know why the Taoiseach referred to the cool weather he found there. In the summertime, these workers face work in temperatures as high as 120° Fahrenheit. Has the Taoiseach ever worked in conditions like that? I have not done so, but I have worked in conditions of 90° to 100° Fahrenheit on a construction site, and I can tell him that is murder in itself. Is it any wonder Kevin Maguire was told by one Nepalese worker: "We are treated like slaves, they don't see us as human and our deaths are cheap"? This is the country into which the Taoiseach breezed in January. He met the elites in their glittering towers. He did not tell them these towers were built on a sordid mire of worker and human exploitation and cruelty, and he uttered not a single word of objection. He has just told us that now.

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