"WORKERS are being held in slave conditions in Irish homes and businesses"
Workers are being held in "slave conditions" in virtually every 'civilised' country in the world, particularly here in the "free west" - Britain included.
The building, catering and hospitality trades are notorious for paying breadline-level wages and forcing their employees to work in appallingly dangerous and unhealthy conditions without safety measures, insurance, or pensions.
The building industry is one of the worst culprits - it took my own trade - (the electrical industry), many years of protest and action to attempt to prevent employers from forcing us to dismantle cancer-causing asbestos-filled appliances, and there are still firms who make their employees handle such lethal material, particularly storage heaters. The same applies to the building industry in general with pipe lagging and and asbestos roofing.
An interesting sidelight on this was when Mrs T's friend, Lady Porter wanted to re-arrange the voting patterns in Westminster, she forcably moved council tenants out of their sellable houses into asbestos-filled multi storey flats in order to give her constituancy a Tory bias - they appear to believe that working people are somehow immune to the effects of asbestos. In the end Lady P did a runner to Israel to avoid paying a £multi-million penalty imposed on her for other crooked dealings.
Thatcher and her mafia made conditions and wages worse by taking away the only voice we had, our trades union representation, setting workers in some industries back at least a century.
The situation has recently been added to, thanks to the predatory corporate investors and their cohorts in government having driven the world economies into the ground to such an extent that the national minimum wage - as miniscule as it is - could well be totally abandoned.
Added to all this, most of our department stores are filled with cheap imported goods manufactured in actual slave conditions quite often produced by child labour - clothing, shoes, toys, electrical goods (particularly sporting ones)... you name it, Britain buys it.
All of which makes the Connors family out to be a bunch of right amatures, don't you think?
Interesting that you should choose Ireland as your example though - a key part of your present crusade, no doubt!!
Jim Carroll