If I were an immigrant gang-master I’d love the British justice system…No, that’s a bit general. If I were a Romanian gang master called Gheorge Ionas, I’d be singing the praises of the British justice system from the rooftops. Gheorge, you see, was fined £500 recently. That’s nothing to sing about? It is if you’ve been found guilty at Craigavon’s magistrates court of keeping your fellow-Romanian agricultural workers in ghastly conditions.
Such as? Well, the court heard how Gheorge forced them to scavenge for out-of-date food from supermarkets, even though he was trousering around £40 a week from them to cover the cost of food, transport and accommodation. Did I mention accommodation? Gheorge had three of his men sleeping in an outbuilding made of bare breeze blocks, without sanitation or heating. Oh, and he was paying them less than the minimum wage. The outbuilding was later declared unfit for human habitation by Craigavon council. The director of Anti-Slavery International, Dr Aidan McQuade, said he was dumb-founded by the sentence on Gheorge:
“That the court considered this extreme exploitation of vulnerable people worth only £500 says to others with criminal intent in this area that they don’t have much to worry about. It’s a dreadful indictment of the Northern Irish judiciary”.
I’m sure it’s not easy being a judge. Fair enough, you get a hefty salary. You might even get to wear a wig and gown. But when you make a judgement, somebody’s going to be upset – the person you sentence, the people who suffered at the hands of the person you sentence, you yourself because in retrospect you might feel you’d made the wrong decision.
So did the judge do the wrong thing with his £500 fine for Gheorge? Well let’s put it like this. Supposing someone among the ranks of dissident republicans had cheated his employees out of money, had forced them to live off out-of-date supermarket produce and had housed them in a building with no sanitation or ventilation. Do you think the judge would have handed down a £500 fine and told him to be on his merry way?
You can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable. Immigrants to Ireland of the Welcomes must be among the most vulnerable – treated with hostility and even violence by some sections of the community. In this case the immigrants were so desperate, they went to Lurgan police station in search of help.
How is it that we live in a state that has such cock-eyed values? Shooting people in the knee-caps or beating them with a baseball bat was never right. But neither is handing an uber-mild fine to a stinking-rotten Romanian apple.
The recent “Blade Runner” Pistorius conviction and sentence perplexes many and opens a similar, and useful, debate.
What is the purpose of sentence, is the question.
We have moved from lynch mob to skilled judgment, from there to informed sentencing.
Punishment is one factor, rehabilitation another.
But a third important issue is recompense for the victim/s.
In OJ Simpson’s case justice to a degree was won in the civil (damages) court.
If there are low or no funds left to be extracted from the perpetrator, little justice can be gained there, however.
Pistorius’ case is to go to appeal, at more cost to Pistorius’ much-depleted funds.
That means less funds available for a civil claim by Reeva’s indigent parents.
The same applies here, surely.
A £500 fine for Gheorge will hurt him and likely make him provide immediate reasonable conditions for his workers with remaining funds, perhaps even some compensation.
Any fine goes into State coffers, which can bring no benefits to the victims.
Do we want justice or revenge?
Justice, most certainly – and the likes of Gheorge should find it impossible to repeat such actions. I’d like to think he could be reformed also and not want to repeat the actions for the right reasons, but I somehow doubt if that’s a runner…
Hi Jude and Anthony . As you both already have some idea , in my opinion some laws are plain silly. The idea that everyone can be rehabilitated and that punishment is somehow a primitive response flies in the face of reality in many cases. There are people out there , who for social or genetic reasons are basically predatory animals by nature and will act in that way come hell or high water. It is naive to believe otherwise.
I’ve had personal experiences of criminal behaviour and how criminals operate. i’ve been robbed. We probably have a friend or relative who has been mugged at some time..Gaols are full of violent criminals who are there because of life-style choices or the fact that they were finally caught red-handed…like the banker who just recently murdered a sex worker while already having another one neatly dead and packaged in a suitcase on his balcony, awaiting discovery .To my way of thinking , a fellow like that needs to be kept out of society for our safety..We’ve had our Moors Murderers and our various high -profile murderers but that is the tip of the iceberg here.
If a guy is fined £500.00 for behaviour like this Gheorge fellow played out, to my mind he probably believes he got away with it nicely .There are people fined as much for a series of traffic violations . That doesn’t seem right to me ..That a man is fined £500.000 for a slavery offence seems daft and also obscene…I’ve talked about the Bladerunner before and i think he got away with murder …, plain and simple. I believe everyone with a dispassionate point of view believes that, No matter what the legal system says..Sure there are points of law invoked but common sense knows that with a past form of violence with firearms , this sounds like his usual behaviour under pressure.
The phrase “There’s no smoke without fire ” is not arrived at by accident. I personally know a man who was gaoled for some two years for killing someone in a traffic accident here in Northern Ireland. He wasn’t a murderer and he didn’t go out to crash into a car while on his way to work , but he was gaoled anyway.He served more time than the Bladerunner is proposed to serve and he had no previous form. This trial may be the only thing that will actually curb the Bladerunner’s behaviour …not the actual killing of his girlfriend. then again he may repeat himself in the future if that’s the way he’s inclined by personality flaw..I would say this Gheorge character will try his hand at some other scam before long and hope that the next judge is equally lenient as the first one..
‘Tis meet he be condemned by course of law’. (Henry VI III.1)
It is evident that slavery and racism remain facts of contemporary life, food for thought when we purchase meat, apples, clothing or any other commodities we take for granted. Underdeveloped nations are characterized by a wide disparity between their rich and poor populations. Symptoms of underdevelopment include lack of access to job opportunities, health care, drinkable water, food, education and housing. The increasing presence of migrant workers in Ireland cannot be separated from a more general trend, namely a dramatic shift from the use of permanent, regular employment to temporary and zero hour contracts. Migrant workers make valuable contributions in the north of Ireland. Migrant workers should not be physically or verbally abused by anyone. They deserve to be protected by the legal system.
Maximum penalty in the Magistrate’s Court is £5,000 fine or six months imprisonment. Not only that, but it appears to be a hybrid offence and could therefore have been remitted to the Crown Court for sentence.