Traveller group complains to BBC about report on slavery claim

THE IRISH Traveller Movement in Britain has lodged a complaint with the BBC following a TV report alleging Travellers have run a multimillion-euro slavery ring in Sweden and Norway which has exploited vulnerable British men for nearly a decade.

The report was partly based on an official 2010 Swedish human trafficking report which claimed to have found 26 cases where British nationals were brought to Sweden by Travellers and forced to work 14 hours a day. No prosecutions have occurred in Sweden, but there has been one in Norway.

Similar allegations have been made against Irish Travellers – that they entice homeless men, often suffering drugs and alcohol problems, with promises of work. Last year, a number of arrests were made during a series of police raids in several parts of Britain.

Fr Joe Browne, chairman of the Irish Traveller Movement in Britain, accused the BBC of “racialisation criminality”, where he said an entire community was being tarred because of so far unproven allegations against a few.

“There is an undercurrent to all of this that is trying to associate Travellers with slavery. The ethnicity of people should not matter. If this is going on, then people should be prosecuted regardless of where they come [from],” he told The Irish Times . Lobby group Anti-Slavery International said it was satisfied that the allegations about Travellers’ conduct in Sweden were accurate, but its director, Aidan McQuade, said: “This shows that they are like the rest of us, not different.

“The settled community do this as well. Basically, a group of cunning people have found out that this is a good way to nobble vulnerable people, both British and otherwise,” he said.

Last September, it was learnt from the official Swedish inquiry that some of the alleged victims, mostly British, but also Irish, Romanian and Polish, were forced to work from 7am to 11pm for £10 a day, and subjected to violence and the threat of violence. One 22-year-old from Lincolnshire, Oliver Hayre, who had complained about being held against his will, died in a caravan fire in October 2005, in southern Sweden. Police decided the fire was an accident, but the inquiry described it as arson.

Hayre’s father, Martin, believes that his son stayed working in Sweden because he believed his family would be attacked if he left.

In 2008, one man was jailed for 18 months for holding two British men in “wretched conditions”, leading the judge to remark that they believed they would be beaten or killed if they ran away.