PEOPLE smugglers earn anything from £2,500 to £15,000 for every person they ship into Ireland or the UK. It is a very lucrative business.

Those who are victims of people smugglers know the risks that come with this illegal trade. It is easy of course to exploit the Common Travel Area. Even with the constantly changing laws that often affect asylum seekers and refugees, the long-standing Common Travel agreement between Ireland and the UK is a target for the mafias that run the people trafficking business. 

In order for them to succeed, they must have the following: Demand for their business and this is easy because we immigrants are told that British and Irish streets are paved with gold. Take that with a big pinch of salt but many of us still believe it and many died in the attempt to come. Pathetic or sorry you may say, but migration is not a rosy affair.

Every single person has an individual story why they want to leave country A and go to country B. The traffickers exploit every individual story and make it a mass experience of serious exploitation: look at those people – we must make money from them. 

The readiness to move because of the effects of globalisation is also a pull factor to the human trafficking business. There has to be corruption in some circles for this to happen. Human trafficking didn’t start in Belfast, Tripoli, France, Ireland or Britain. It has been there in different corners of the globe since the beginning of time.

Some traffickers believe that they are actually doing a magical favour to the lives of the poor of the world. This assertion is in contrast with reality because sometimes the victims of human traffickers are coming from affluent backgrounds, but their story is unique to themselves. 

Many commentators have compared modern human trafficking to the shipment of Africans to the Americas. The commonalities are there, like drowning and thousands dying in the voyages at sea – even though the journeys are shorter and more mechanised than those of the 15th century. 

Yes, there is corruption and the crime of human trafficking is unacceptable, but why is it easily coordinated, what is going wrong? Courts around the world have their own sovereign ways of applying their laws which make it very difficult to follow one or two specific ways of dealing with the problem.

The admission that there is serious collusion between organised crime in economically developed countries and traffickers from poor nations should follow with sanctions on either party by the United Nations. A world umbrella organisation must now act to stop further deaths of innocent people, victims of human trafficking.

East Wall protests

In the East Wall area of Dublin, there are continuing weekly racial protests against the housing of refugees. I really think the Irish should lead by example now and showcase what they know about migration – it is their middle name. 

The Irish have historically left the island to settle abroad. Let the Irish Republic give employment to the refugees so that they can fully contribute to the revitalising of the economy that has had a bad knock for the last few years. We must be all glad that here in the North the refugees are not being harassed by anti-migrant protestors.