Hundreds of women are being trafficked into Ireland to work as prostitutes, an Oireachtas committee has been told.
Hundreds more immigrant workers are being used as "forced labour", the Joint Committee on European Affairs heard yesterday.
Kathleen Fahy of Ruhama, an organisation that works with prostitutes, said it came across its first victim of sex trafficking in 2000. In the past two years, the organisation had worked with 33 such women and was aware of another 70 in a similar position.
These numbers were "the tip of the iceberg", she said.
The average age of the women was between 18 and 25, although eight were minors. The main countries of origin were Nigeria, Albania and Romania.
Most of the women had suffered sexual and psychological abuse, were in urgent need of help, but were distrustful of officialdom. Ms Fahy called on the Government to provide a legal framework for dealing with trafficked women.
The State should ratify a UN Convention on the issue, she said, and women should be able to avail of a "reflection period" of up to six months when they come to the attention of the authorities. Men who used the services of trafficked women prostitutes should be criminalised.
Delphine O'Keeffe of the Migrant Rights Centre said it was dealing with between 10 and 15 immigrant workers each year who were victims of "forced labour".
Most were from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Ukraine, and many were working in the restaurant industry, she told TDs and senators.
Ms O'Keeffe blamed the work-permit system, under which the employer not the employee holds the permit, as the "root cause" of this exploitation.
She described the system as "a charter for exploitation" which left immigrant workers "at the mercy" of employers. However, she acknowledged that some employers had been "blacklisted" for infringements of employment law.
People trafficking is a $9 billion a year business, Dianne Grammar, Dublin representative of the International Organisation for Migration, told the committee.
She distinguished between smuggling, which involves the consent of those transported, and trafficking, which is forced and exploitative.
However, Ms O'Keeffe pointed to the many "grey areas" surrounding the issue, with people crossing between different definitions over time. For example, she said, people could come to Ireland legally on a work visa, but then find they had lost control of their situation and be exploited.
Ms Grammar said there was no evidence of any trafficking in human organs taking place in Ireland.
