Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I should have said in my initial comments that on the occasion of a Bill like this coming through it is worth considering the horrific events that took place in the English Channel this week with desperate migrants losing their lives in a boat that capsized. The seas around Europe have become a graveyard for thousands and thousands of desperate people - men, women and children - who are fleeing war, persecution and desperate conditions and losing their lives in the most horrible fashion. We saw a very stark example of it this week. It is always worth contemplating how we were in that situation once upon a time. Indeed we suffered the same demonisation and mistreatment that those desperate people suffered. People from this country lost their lives trying to cross oceans to flee hunger, poverty and mistreatment. They often suffered terrible treatment in the countries they went to, at least initially, until we organised and fought for our rights and improved our situation. It is worth saying that. It is worth reminding ourselves that we suffered the same racist stereotypes as well.

I am often fond of quoting Karl Marx. One of the things he was particularly interested in was the plight of the Irish worker and the demonisation of the Irish worker in Britain in the middle of the 19th century. The popular magazines in Britain used to demonise the Irish workers and present them as less than human, as monkeys, a stereotype that was later applied to people of different colour. That early stereotype was applied to the Irish. One of the things Marx said was that the mistreatment of the Irish worker, the racism and exploitation directed at the Irish worker, was the secret weakness of the British working class movement. That is a very telling phrase. In other words, the degree to which the working class movement in Britain allowed anti-Irish racism to persist weakened their movement. Not only did it mean the mistreatment of the Irish worker but it weakened the struggle of the entire British working class. If one group of workers, in that case the Irish workers, were treated badly, paid badly and exploited, that was used as a stick to beat all the other workers.

That remains the case. Workers in this country need to understand they have a stake in ensuring that migrant workers here are not exploited and treated badly and that they have rights and entitlements. If workers do not ensure this, particularly because migrants are critical for food supply, the migrants’ poor conditions and mistreatment will be a stick with which to beat other workers and keep their conditions poor. The connection can be seen in the sense that if we allow to persist the mistreatment of migrants in circumstances of widespread illness in an industry where they have very few rights and where documented inspections, even before Covid, have shown breaches of labour and employment law and permit issues more than 50% of the time, it will be bad for all workers.

It is worth commenting on what occurs along the food supply chain. Some of the people who contacted me to alert me about the mistreatment of the workers in the meat plants during the Covid pandemic were beef farmers who had been part of the Beef Plan movement. That was very interesting and good because they themselves were fighting against the miserable incomes they, as direct producers of beef, earn. Their average income is between €10,000 and €12,000. When the Beef Plan brought the matter to my attention, I could not believe how poor the incomes were of the people who produce one of the main exports of the country, an export that generates enormous profits for the big agri-processors, the Larry Goodmans of this world. Staggering profits are made by such people but the direct producers, the farmers, get a pittance. The people processing the meat in the meat factories work in terrible conditions, sleep in dormitories with rampant Covid and have very few rights. On the next step along the chain, there are the low-paid retail workers in Tesco, the shops, the supermarkets and so on, which workers are among the most poorly paid and often have very precarious conditions. Is it not telling?

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