Mary Harney has more explaining to do about Gama Construction, writes Chris Dooley.
It is difficult to fathom what Mary Harney hoped to achieve by publishing a report yesterday relating to the Turkish company Gama Construction.
Ostensibly, the Tánaiste wanted to demonstrate that everything possible was done when she was minister for enterprise to investigate allegations against Gama of migrant worker exploitation.
There had in fact been two investigations, she told the Dáil, and she would publish a report on one of them right away.
Far from being an "investigation", however, the two-page document she subsequently released amounts to a cursory dismissal of the complaints against Gama. It concludes that no investigation is warranted.
The report was written in October 2003 by an unnamed senior official in the work permits section of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. It was requested by the Tánaiste after she received complaints about Gama's activities through a constituency clinic.
More than a third of the report outlines how the work permits system applies to Gama, explaining that the company is granted such permits "liberally and quickly" to ensure it delivers projects on time. The "recent allegations", the official asserts, "emanate from one source", the bricklayers' union Batu, and arise from an inter-union dispute between it and the carpenters' union, Ucatt.
Previous complaints, the report adds, came from a "disappointed Irish rival contractor" and were found to be "without substance".
The official concluded that "sweeping allegations from one source, unsupported by evidence", which had not been made until the outbreak of an inter-union dispute, did not provide the basis for a further investigation.
All of which is well and good, and perhaps the official's conclusion that no further investigation was warranted was correct based on the available evidence.
But if Ms Harney wishes to demonstrate that Gama's activities were properly monitored by her former department, she needs to do a lot more than release a largely irrelevant report. The central question remains: what kind of investigation was carried out into Gama Construction in the first place?
All we know to date is that the department's labour inspectorate did carry out such an investigation, prior to the report released yesterday, and found nothing amiss.
It was to this investigation Ms Harney referred when she told Cabinet colleague Séamus Brennan in a letter in May 2003 that allegations against Gama had been found to be "without substance".
What needs to be explained now is how thorough or otherwise was that investigation?
It is understood the inspectors examined pay slips, but did they interview Turkish employees to establish that the records matched actual payments? Did they ask the workers about their actual, rather than recorded, working hours?
Whatever the inspectors did, they found nothing. Yet three years later, sent in again by Minister Micheál Martin, they have found enough to warrant referral of their report to the Garda, the Revenue Commissioners, the director of corporate enforcement and other bodies.
Ms Harney, of course, can argue she had no option but to accept the findings of her inspectorate. She could hardly be expected to examine Gama's books herself.
This misses a key point, however. For several years now, it has been evident that the labour inspectorate has not been adequately resourced or staffed.
Senior union leaders say that when then minister for finance Charlie McCreevy sanctioned the appointment of eight additional inspectors in pay talks last summer, Ms Harney blocked the move and accepted only four.
A spokeswoman for her former department would only say yesterday it was "not privy" to what went on in the negotiations.
Had Ms Harney acted earlier in equipping the inspectorate to carry out its mandate, the initial investigation into Gama might have delivered a different outcome.
Trade unions, too, stand accused of failing the Gama workers, although their overall record in tackling migrant worker abuse is good. Ultimately, it is the job of the minister for enterprise to ensure workers' rights are upheld.
In welcoming Gama to Ireland, Ms Harney no doubt wanted to shake up a heavily unionised and regulated construction sector, in the interests of delivering major National Development Plan projects on budget and on time.
The rights of the Gama workers, however, appear to have been overlooked somewhere along the way.