When an Irish government minister referred to Turkish workers as "kebabs" he gave expression to the virulent racism widespread in Irish society.
Liberals called for his resignation, especially since he was responsible for foreign affairs, but no one really expected it. After all, what's so outrageous about racist remarks when they honestly express government policy?
The remarks came in the Dail (parliament) and were directed against Socialist Party TD (MP) Joe Higgins who had exposed scandalous exploitation of Turkish workers employed at a Turkish company, Gama, engaged in government construction contracts.
The workers had been paid less than 3 euro (just over £2) an hour and often worked over 80 hours per week without payment for overtime.
One Turkish worker recorded his hours since arriving in Ireland. "There were three weeks I worked up to 90 hours. We worked in every type of weather condition; there were no stops for rain. For the first one and a half months I worked every single day. There was no day off, not even Sundays."
The Gama scandal hit the headlines when Joe Higgins revealed that much of the workers' wages were being paid into Dutch bank accounts under the workers' own names but which they knew nothing about.
Gama had won a number of state construction contracts worth over 200 million euro, and was picked out specifically by some members of the irish government and civil servants when the latter were visiting the Turkey in June 2000.
The company does not have to pay full PAYE or social insurance on hundreds of its workers. Since 2003 it has benefited from exemptions under a special scheme to the extent that of 1,867 workers exempted, 70% have been employees of Gama.
The Irish government has palmed off expressions of concern with an assurance that an inspection found nothing to worry about. The high priority accorded by the state to labour protection was subsequently revealed by the fact that it has more dog inspectors than labour inspectors!
Most worrying of all is that this exploitation of labour was not happening in some notorious anti-union company. The workers were members of Ireland's biggest trade union SIPTU!
The union tamely accepted the words of the government that everything at the company was OK. Then, like the police chief in the film Casablanca, SIPTU held up its hands in horror and exclaimed how shocked it was that such exploitation was occurring to its members!
It was embarrassed into
GAMIA GAUD TD Joe Higgins marches with Gama workers throwing some of its weight behind the demands of the workers by supporting a legal case which eventually resulted in the workers getting some of their money back.