Many foreign national women lured to Ireland by the promise of jobs and a better life end up working against their will in the sex industry, a nun who is deeply involved in refugee work said yesterday.
Sr Breege Keenan, of Dublin's Vincentian Refugee Centre, warned at a conference in Knock, Co Mayo, that many of the women who are trafficked into this country are heading for a life of prostitution.
"They are promised jobs and a better life but end up working against their will in the sex industry, afraid of the gardaí."
Sr Breege, a Daughter of Charity nun, was speaking at the the seminar, Welcoming the Stranger: The Pastoral Care of our Migrants, organised by the Western Theological Institute.
She suggested that the volume of human trafficking to this country may be greater due to the fact that Ireland is not a party to the European Convention against Trafficking, which has been signed by 16 of 25 countries.
On general attitudes towards migrants in Ireland, Sr Breege said there was a "culture of suspicion" rather than one of "welcome" here.
There was an attitude that migrants are taking our social welfare, getting the best of medical treatment and are taking our jobs.
The arrival and the presence of migrants had become a sensitive subject, Sr Breege continued.
She added that many feel that the growing number of migrants is unacceptable and, in certain countries, including our own, a political party with a platform against foreign nationals would be in a good position to win votes.
This was hypocritical, Sr Breege stated, because at the same time there was also an attitude that migrants were needed in Ireland to "do the dirty work that we can no longer do".
She went on: "To be honest, we are only happy to have people from other countries do these jobs while at the same time we refuse to recognise them as citizens in their own right benefiting from the same rights as others."
Pointing out that many asylum seekers resident in hostels here are living on €19.10 a week, Sr Breege said the social doctrine of the church had great concern for migrant workers, particularly for the serious problems they face including discrimination and xenophobia, long working hours, pay lower than that of native workers for the same job, poor housing or none, and non-integration into social life.
Another speaker at yesterday's one-day conference, Eoin O'Mahony, research and development officer for the Irish Episcopal Conference, Maynooth, Co Kildare, said official data on new arrivals in Ireland is scarce.
Mr O'Mahony said the Department of Justice was "very cagey" about the release of such information.
Most of the major population growth recorded in the last census was due to immigration, Mr O'Mahony said.
Stressing that migrants to Ireland needed to be valued as "people not problems", Mr O'Mahony said that most migrants were productively employed and, in fact, the employment rate for foreign nationals here was higher than that of the native Irish population.