Drug dealers are enslaving trafficked labourers to work in squalid cannabis grow houses in remote rural Ireland.
Irish, Vietnamese, Chinese and Polish criminals are all competing to grow weed in hidden houses, sheds, factory units and even operations buried underground. But now it has emerged than ruthless gangsters have enslaved men to tend the plants at the heart of the multi-million euro industry.
Two men were kept as prisoners in a Co. Cavan grow house until they were discovered by Gardaí during a raid on the property at Rahardrum near Virginia. Cannabis plants worth nearly €1 million were seized, which had been tended to by the Vietnamese men.
A garda detective said that he didn’t believe the men were free to come and go and that they didn’t know what country they were in when arrested last February.
One of the men, Hoang Minh Thong (26), had paid smugglers €5,000 to get to Ireland in a shipping container that came from Russia. He had been promised €500 a month, but instead got no pay and was left with only a duvet to sleep on after being locked into the grow-house.
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