The Irish government moved quickly on Tuesday to address concerns over the treatment of migrant workers on its fishing trawlers, following the publication of a Guardian investigation into the sector on Monday, which uncovered allegations of exploitation and human trafficking for cheap labour.

The cabinet has decided to set up a taskforce, which brings together five government departments and the Irish police, and will be chaired by Simon Coveney, minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM). It will meet on Thursday to begin work immediately examining “the wide range of issues identified in the Guardian’s report”, a statement from DAFM said. The other departments involved are the Department of Justice, the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, and the attorney general’s office.

Pressure had been growing on the Irish government on Monday to protect African and Asian workers on its prawn and whitefish trawlers, with politicians and migrants’ rights organisations in Ireland, the UK and the US calling for urgent action to prevent exploitation of undocumented fishermen on Irish boats.

A catalogue of alleged abuses reported to us by migrant workers interviewed during our investigation in ports around Ireland, and present in various combinations on some but not all trawlers, included: migrant workers being brought into Ireland via Belfast without presenting themselves to immigration; being confined to vessels unless given permission by their skippers to go on land; being paid less than half what an Irish worker eligible for the national minimum wage would earn; suffering extreme sleep deprivation, with workers having to work for days and nights on end with only a few hours’ sleep and no proper rest days; and workers going hungry or being cheated of wages.

Boat owners and skippers have denied the allegations. Some Irish boat owners have argued that undocumented migrant crew members are self-employed and therefore that Irish employment law on minimum pay and rest hours does not apply.

An Irish official who did not want to be named told us: “There are a lot of good and decent owners doing the right thing, but they are competing against owners with untrained, underpaid or even unpaid trafficked crews. The fishing industry needs to be split for anything to really succeed: praise the good, shame the bad.”

Responding to the investigation, the industry’s Irish Fish Producers’ Organisation (IFPO) urged the Irish government to grant work permits to migrants from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) to tackle crew shortages.

Migrant rights groups also said granting work permits to those already in the country without proper papers was vital to tackling abuse.

The chief executive of the IFPO, Francis O’Donnell, said that he had written to jobs minister Richard Bruton repeatedly to ask the government to reconsider its position that non-EEA fishermen were not eligible to apply for work permits. “The Irish government has to stop putting their heads in the sand and meet with us.

“People working in the Irish fishing industry should be afforded an opportunity to be documented and get a work permit,” he said.

O’Donnell accepted there was a problem in the industry but told us that he believed it was limited. “Human trafficking and fishing industry in one sentence for me is harrowing – if it is happening it is a small number of people doing it. We do not condone it, just because they are from somewhere else – they are exactly the same as us and should be treated exactly the same as Irish crew members. There is no ambiguity about this.”

Minister Coveney said he was “concerned” about the allegations about labour abuse in the Guardian and pointed to a project led by An Garda Síochána, the Irish police, to address potential human trafficking in the Irish maritime sector.

The UK’s independent anti-slavery commissioner, Kevin Hyland, welcomed the Guardian’s work and said that the fishing sector in the north Atlantic was one of his priorities in tackling modern slavery and human trafficking. The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is also a key focus of his concern. A legal loophole allows seafarers to transit the UK briefly to join ships working exclusively in international waters. Our investigation revealed that some agents and owners appear to be exploiting these transit arrangements to bring Ghanaian and Filipino workers into Heathrow and Belfast airports and then take them across the land border with Ireland, bypassing Irish immigration controls.

Some migrant fishermen did tell us they were happy to work on Irish fishing boats even though they were paid far less than local or EU crew because it was more than they could earn back home.



The commissioner added: “We are working with the police service of Northern Ireland, An Garda Síochána, the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, Police Scotland and law enforcement across England and Wales to develop a response to the fishing industry. We know it is high risk for trafficking.”

He accepted that victims of modern slavery have been found on vessels in British waters, “and we know if they are working in British waters they are also working in Irish waters too, with known cases in Northern Ireland and the Republic”. Where victims had been moved through the UK into Ireland he said UK prosecutions for trafficking were highly possible.

The need to protect the victims of human trafficking in the fishing sector should be paramount, said Fiona Mactaggart, Labour MP for Slough and co-chair of the UK all-party parliamentary group on human trafficking and modern slavery, in response to our investigation. “The only way you can prosecute successfully is by protecting the victims, and that has to include giving them a chance to earn some money so that they can escape the people who brought them to Ireland.”

Responding to arguments by some Irish boat owners that undocumented migrant crew members are self-employed and that Irish employment law on minimum pay and rest hours does not apply, Mactaggart said this was a nonsense. “If workers are told they cannot get off boats, they are imprisoned as well as enslaved. You can’t say they are self-employed – that’s a fiction because they have no control over their lives.”

In the Irish senate, Labour senator Susan O’Keeffe called for the government to investigate conditions of non-European Economic Area migrants in the fishing fleet urgently, saying that all workers should be given proper training and protection of pay. “The fishing industry is worth millions to the Irish economy and its good name and reputation is at the heart of its success. Trafficking is at crisis point in the western world and the Guardian’s detailed work reveals an ugly picture of how we are treating some workers in this country. Those who may be involved in trafficking people for the equivalent of slave labour must face prosecution. There is no place in a modern society for the behaviour reported here.”



Tatiana Jardan, director of the Human Trafficking Foundation, said: “Now we understand that trafficking on Irish prawn and fishing vessels happens close to our shores, not just far away where we have no power, but in Ireland and through the UK we can’t close our eyes to it. We need to protect the rights of human beings, not the interests of multimillion-pound industries.”

She hoped the new Modern Slavery Act, which places an obligation on UK companies to check their supply chains are free of slavery and trafficking, would force retailers sourcing sourced prawns and whitefish from Ireland to take action.



The former anti-trafficking ambassador for the US Mark Lagon expressed concern that modern forms of slavery were becoming endemic in the seafood industry around the world. “It is striking that this kind of growing exploitation can happen in the US, Europe or in the sea near Ireland and not just in places such as south-east Asia – men seeking a better life abroad who end up on the high seas in zones of little regulation and monitoring.” Governments need to press for prosecutions and recognise that irregular migrants could become victims of trafficking, he added.

