In the Seanad on 4 May 2005, speaking on a Labour Party private members motion on exploiting immigrant workers, I said:

I am an employer. As a class, we are the villains of this piece. I cannot, and will not, take the part of those employers who have been letting the side down by abusing the rights of immigrant workers.

My attitude to immigrants is quite simple, and it should be well known in this House, as I have often stated it. I believe that, as a nation, we should welcome newcomers to our society. We ourselves have been welcomed in many countries around the world over the centuries. We have heard that stated again tonight. Immigrants have much to offer our economy and our society.

One reason countries welcome immigrants is that, to get on in their new home, they are prepared to do work that is no longer attractive to people already living here and to work for rates of pay that people already living here do not find attractive enough. I recently spoke to somebody working for my company. She is a floor cleaner from the Ukraine, and is happy working in this country, but she is a qualified psychologist. She told me that her son, a qualified scientist, is working in Dublin, also as a cleaner.

That is a reminder that people will undertake work far beneath their capability. One of our tasks is somehow to find a way to change that situation. We have seen people?s ability to lift themselves up from where they were before within a short period. On a recent visit to America, I met a man born in 1936, I think he said. He described the experience of arriving there from Germany with his family in 1949, when he was aged 13. There were three or four in his family. Within four weeks, that family had bought a home, and within six weeks they had a car. He told me that was so far removed from the way of life he could have expected back in post-war Germany. When people come to our society and achieve something similar, it is a joy to see, and we need to encourage that.

As I was saying, immigrants can often be ready to start at the bottom and work their way up. Within limits, that is perfectly acceptable. Those limits are the nub of the problem. Our law rightly imposes on employers very strict constraints on the terms by which they may employ people. For instance, the law lays down that they must pay at least the minimum wage. No individual employer and no individual employee has the right to enter into any contract that nullifies that agreement. A raft of conditions apply to working conditions and health and safety matters. Some people will argue that we have too much regulation in that regard, but that is not a point for this debate.

The point is that the law is the law. No one has the right to consider himself or herself outside or above and beyond the law. As we recently discovered with the issue of taking money from the residents of nursing homes, not even the Government - the State itself - has the right to break the law.

I believe immigrants are entitled to be treated exactly the same as everybody else. Part of the difficulty in making that a reality arises from the circumstances in which immigrants often find themselves. If they are illegal immigrants, they are immediately open to becoming the prey of unscrupulous people. Even immigrants who are here perfectly legally often find themselves at a disadvantage.

One difficulty that has been much encountered recently is caused by the fact that people do not necessarily speak our language or the English language. That cuts them off from many of the safety nets that would normally come into play. I know the Government and unions have taken some steps in that regards. In one of our supermarket outlets, we now do our training in three different languages. We need to do that to train people and have them understand what is required.

Another difficulty arises from the fact that the immigrants do not know what their rights are. Sometimes, trade unions can be to blame for that. There is an onus on us all, including trade unions, to draw the attention of those who do not know their rights to what their rights are. Many of the workers come from a totally different situation in their home countries. They might be more used to tough employers who can do whatever they like without any interference from the state or trade unions.

Some come from places where a wage far below our legal minimum wage is considered quite generous. Now, we have the highest minimum wage in Europe, or if we do not, then we are very close to it. We can be proud of that fact. On occasions, however, I question the wisdom of that, as it eliminates jobs that would otherwise exist but do not exist because of the minimum wage being at a certain level. We can discuss that subject on some other occasion.

That all adds up to a situation where we cannot reasonably expect our new immigrants to stand up for their own rights. In that sense, we must treat them differently and they need more protection than the average Irish worker. Unlike the average Irish worker, the immigrant probably knows very little about his or her rights and entitlements, and still less about how to go about dealing with the problems that they come up against.

The recent controversies revealed the total inadequacy of the labour inspectorate. I do not of course mean that the inspectors themselves are inadequate, but it is obvious that there are not enough of them and that the inspectorate is woefully under-resourced. We cannot afford to let that state of affairs continue.

It is with a heavy heart that I say recent events have shown that there are too many employers in this country who will exploit the people who work for them if they get the chance to do so. I would like to think such people are few and far between, but we can no longer be as sure about that as we used to be. In recent months, problems have arisen with individual farmers using immigrant labour. Problems have arisen among giant multinationals, which we brought here to help build our infrastructure. We have also heard about problems arising among respected private sector companies that have contracted out jobs under doubtful circumstances to third-party firms supplying cheap foreign labour.

I join those urging the Government to take the problem seriously and to take effective action to deal with it as a matter of urgency.