Ireland has been swept with an almost unprecedented wave of disgust and fury after footage emerged online on Thursday of dozens of Bulgarian fruit pickers were filmed leaving the airport after being flown into the country by Ryanair to work for fruit company Keelings.
This is not the first time a major Irish company has shunned needy Irish workers in favour of importing cheap foreign labour, but coming as it does a national health crisis in which Irish citizens are being confined to their homes or the immediate vicinity it has hit a particularly sore nerve.
Hundreds of thousands have been made unemployed, the country has entered a new major recession, Irish citizens are being threatened with arrest, fines or imprisonment for leaving their homes because of the Covid-19 outbreak.
However, the government has not stopped non-citizens, including Third World migrants, from entering the country and now in an insult that may just be too much for the Irish people to once again grin and bare companies are being permitted to mass import cheap labour from abroad.
One Irish social media user expressed their disgust with the decision stating under a photo featuring Tánaiste Simon Coveney and Keelings owner Joe Keeling:
“So here we have a lovely photo of Simon Coveney and Joe Keeling. You see Joe doesn’t just grow strawberries. No no. He’s a great friend of Minister Coveney’s. So great in fact, that when Simon was the minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, he had great pleasure in announcing Joes appointment as chairman of Horse Racing Ireland!! You see it boils down again to who you know. It’s not everyone who can charter a Ryan Air plane to bring 189 non essential workers into the country on Easter Monday, in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.”
The public fury has now extended beyond Keelings, which is facing a national boycott, but to Varadkar’s caretaker government and Michael O’Leary’s Ryanair with many asking how many more non-essential cheap foreign workers will be imported into Ireland this summer.
Meanwhile many others are saying that the workers are completely justified in coming here and that Keelings are fully within their rights to bring in any workers that they deem necessary to fulfill their harvest.
Social media users have been defending Keelings saying:
“Irish people wouldn’t take those jobs, they had to go elsewhere, they didn’t even get applications from many Irish”.
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