This week, the High Court awarded these women more than €50,000 in unpaid wages and damages. But there is still no guarantee that they will receive any money from the cleaning company that brought them from Brazil to Ireland on false promises. They tell their story to Chris Dooley, Industry and Employment Correspondent
Mato Grosso do Sul, a state of 1.9 million people on the borders of Paraguay and Bolivia, may not be the first port of call for most visitors to Brazil. It does have its attractions for the more adventurous tourist, however, most notably the Pantanal, an open swampland larger than France and one of the rare places in Brazil, according to the Rough Guide, where you're "more likely to find wildlife than nightlife".
There is, of course, nightlife too, particularly in Campo Grande, the capital city of 650,000 people where skyscraping banks share the downtown space with traditional ranchers' general stores. There is little obvious poverty in the city, which has almost doubled in size since the 1970s, but in the agricultural regions of this vast state, the picture is very different. Its soya, wheat and cotton plantations, large cattle ranches, and pig and poultry farms make it one of Brazil's most important producers of agricultural goods. There are far too few jobs to go round, however, and the government's big project - a gas pipeline to Bolivia to supply energy and attract industry to the region - may provide hope for the future but is not putting food on any tables just yet.
When your prospects in your home state are zero, even a cleaning job thousands of miles from home can seem attractive. So early last year, when Neusa da Silva Resende received a call from her brother-in-law at her home in Sidrolandia, about 150 kilometres south of Campo Grande, telling her of such a job, she decided to go for it.
He had been approached in Sao Paulo by a Brazilian woman now living in Ireland who outlined the pay and conditions in At Hand Cleaning Services. Staff would receive £1,200 a month after tax, have flights and accommodation paid and work eight hours a day.
Leaving behind her 24-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter, Neusa arrived in Dublin in May 2001 with two other women and a Brazilian man, all recruits of At Hand Cleaning. Her primary objective, she says, was to support her elderly parents and pay for her daughter's education.
The nightmare began straight away. Neusa found herself working 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week. Initially, she was paid £178 per week, but £28 was deducted to go towards the cost of her plane ticket. When she raised the question of overtime with the Brazilian woman who had recruited her, she was told: "There's no such thing as overtime in Ireland."
The work, she recalls, involved cleaning "every type of building", from private houses to large company offices. At Hand's clients, the High Court has been told, included Hibernia Computer Services in Ballsbridge, Golden Vale in Tallaght, UPVC Windows in Clondalkin, JVC Recycling in Cookstown and St Margaret's Golf Club in Co Dublin.
From the start, payment of wages was sporadic and Neusa could be left several weeks without pay. There were other problems too. The company did not have proper transport, so Neusa and her co-workers were collected from their house in Tallaght, rented by the company, in a sports car.
"There was no room at the back. We were all squashed in with the vacuum cleaners, and the cleaning liquids would spill all over us," she says.
Most days, the car would call at 7 a.m. or 7.30 a.m., but "when there was a rush on", they would start at 6 a.m..
In October last year the secretary of At Hand Cleaning, Samantha Hutton, made newspaper headlines when she was convicted, with an associate, of managing a brothel. She was fined £6,500 and received an 18-month suspended jail sentence.
After the case, the woman who had recruited Neusa and the others apparently ended her involvement with the company, and Hutton took a more direct role in affairs. She began turning up at the cleaners' house with a driver. By then, a van had been purchased, which at least made transportation with the cleaning equipment a little easier. Bizarrely, Hutton had the windows blacked out with refuse sacks and, as a result, Neusa never knew where she was being taken.
In February, after threatening several times to give up the job, Neusa took a break and returned to Brazil. While she was there, Hutton phoned her and asked her to return to Ireland and to bring her sisters with her. There would be plenty of work and "better pay for everyone", she promised.
So, with hope renewed, she returned with two of her sisters, one of whom stayed only two months before returning home, owed 36 hours of overtime.Nilce Mara, the other sister, had left behind her husband and four-year-old son. She decided to stay, but only if conditions improved.
"We confronted Samantha," says Neusa, "and told her we couldn't take any more. She turned on the charm and said, 'You've been a wonderful worker. I've never had a moment's problem with you. I can't afford to lose you. The firm needs you' - and so on. I said we had far too much work and could not keep it up and she said: 'Well, if you have anybody else in your family, bring them over.'"
New pay rates were offered: €350 a week for Neusa, €320 for Mara and between €300 and €250 for the new recruits.
By the time their sister, Nilma, arrived in Dublin with her husband, Elis, in July, Neusa and Mara had not been paid for a month. As they could not both afford the bus fares from Tallaght to the airport, only Neusa went to meet them. The three of them then boarded a bus to begin the onerous journey back to Tallaght by public transport.
If pay and conditions were so bad, why did they invite Elis and Nilma to come? The couple had left two little boys, aged two and one, at home with their family in Brazil. "You have to appreciate how bad things are where we come from," says Mara. "There are no jobs and no hope of a job. Samantha used to pay us fortnightly, but delays were not unusual. We thought we would get paid."
Instead, she adds, things got "seriously worse".
At around the time the couple arrived, Hutton went on holidays and her driver took over operations. Some days Elis and Nilma were collected and taken to work, other days they were left at home.
When Hutton returned from her break, she denied responsibility for hiring the couple and refused to pay them. Later, after Neusa "broke down and cried", she said she would pay the couple for the hours they had worked, and offered them employment cleaning houses in a recently developed estate in Kilcock, Co Kildare. "She promised us €50 per house, and said she would give us the money we were already owed the following week," says Nilma.
The work was "very heavy", and after a full day shifting cement bags and blocks from the first house, the couple had still not finished the first house. They stuck with it for a week, but after one particular evening, when darkness fell and the company driver had still not arrived to collect them, Elis decided he had had enough. The couple had still not received a cent from the company for any of their work.
Elis's decision to quit came at a bad time for Hutton. She had a big job on the next day and needed all four to be available. So she sent her driver out to Tallaght with €200 in cash for himself and Nilma.When the driver reported back by mobile phone that none of the four was prepared to continue working until all monies due were paid, he was instructed to take the €200 back.
It was the final straw. During the summer, Neusa's 16-year-old daughter, Francini, had come to Ireland for a holiday. Neusa was refused time off so, to spend time with her mother, Francini went out to work with her every day. "I didn't get one day off to go out with my daughter," says Neusa. "She was here for six weeks in July and August and every day of her holidays she worked. She kept saying: 'This is a first world country. This is absurd.' "
Unlike her mother, Francini spoke English. She made inquiries and discovered the existence of the Equality Authority. So, the day after Hutton's driver returned with the €200 safely back in his pocket, instead of going to work the three sisters and Elis took a bus into town.
The phone calls from Hutton began while they were still at the bus stop, and continued as they made their way to the authority's office on Clonmel Street."She phoned us about 15 times to tell us to get off the bus and go to work." Hutton had a big contract to fulfil and was frantic. She had, however, pushed her luck too far and would soon be facing legal action.
In the High Court this week, Mr Justice Peter Kelly awarded more than €50,000 to the four in unpaid wages and damages, saying they had been cruelly tricked by Hutton. There is still no guarantee, however, that they will be paid and, in the meantime, their circumstances continue to worsen.
Hutton told the court her company had few assets. There were four industrial hoovers, she said, worth between €900 and €1,000 when new.
Nilma had already returned home to her sons before the hearing. Last week, the central heating in the house shared by the other three was cut off. They have been wearing their overcoats indoors since.
On Wednesday, the day after the court hearing, the owner of the house, who had rented it to At Hand Cleaning, called to tell the three, not for the first time, that they would have to leave. On Thursday, he gave them a deadline of lunchtime yesterday.
"We're waiting for the knock on the door," says Father Pat McNamara, a Holy Ghost (Spiritans) missionary priest who spent 18 years in Brazil and has been supporting the four. "The trouble is they don't have anywhere else to go."
Mara returned to Brazil yesterday, but Neusa and Elis hope to continue working in Ireland if they can find jobs and secure work permits. Their solicitor, Donal Taaffe, who has worked on the case for free, is now pursuing legal avenues to see if they can be paid the from the State's insolvency fund.
Despite their experience, the four say they have no bad feelings about the country that treated them so inhospitably. "We were not lucky", says Elis. "We met the wrong person, that is all."