Moy Park, Meat Processing, Migration, and an Irish Republican Response

The meat and poultry plants of Tyrone and Armagh are rarely discussed in polite political debate. They should be. Within them lies a concentrated example of how modern Ireland’s economic model actually functions. It functions by prioritising speed over safety, volume over dignity and imported labour over local stability.

Two companies dominate this sector in the North: Moy Park, now part of Pilgrim’s Europe, and ABP Food Group. Both present themselves as responsible employers, both rely heavily on migrant and agency labour and both operate production regimes that would be, at best, politically difficult to defend if their full consequences were honestly acknowledged.

This is not a story about “bad employers” in isolation. It is a story about a system that depends on a constant inflow of vulnerable labour to function at all.

Who Actually Works These Plants?

Dungannon is no longer demographically typical of rural Ireland. Census data shows that over a third of its residents were born outside Ireland or Britain, an extraordinary transformation for a provincial town in just over two decades. This did not happen by chance.

Moy Park has long been associated with large-scale recruitment of foreign workers, most notably from East Timor, alongside others from Eastern Europe and beyond. Academic research and journalistic reporting have consistently documented the presence of a substantial East Timorese workforce at the Dungannon plant, at times estimated to have comprised a significant minority and possibly more, of the overall workforce.

The situation with ABP is less clear, but the firm openly acknowledges in its own corporate statements that it recruits both directly and through labour agencies, including overseas recruitment.

Neither company publishes a full breakdown of nationality, contract type or agency dependence. But anyone who has walked the factory floors of either firm or even spent time in the surrounding towns knows that production lines are staffed disproportionately by foreign workers, many of whom are on insecure contracts and many are dependent on agencies for continued access to work.

This workforce composition is not incidental. It is functional.

Speed, Injury and Disposable Labour

Meat processing is among the most dangerous forms of industrial labour in Europe. High line speeds, knives, repetitive motion, cold environments and long shifts combine into predictable injury patterns.

Recent FOI material I obtained from the Health and Safety Executive for the North of Ireland reveals the scale of this at ABP facilities. Between 2019 and 2025, ABP plants in the Six Counties recorded 154 RIDDOR-reportable accidents and dangerous occurrences, with the overwhelming majority concentrated at the Lurgan and Newry sites.

When these figures are compared with publicly available employment size bands, which may understate the true workforce by excluding agency labour, the implied rate of serious workplace incidents is far above the British all-industry average and still well above the already elevated norm for food manufacturing.

Moy Park’s recorded incident figures are lower. This should not, however, be taken at face value. In sectors dominated by agency labour, under-reporting is endemic. Foreign workers on insecure contracts are far less likely to report injuries or incidents that could jeopardise future shifts or their relationship with an employer.

In both cases, the underlying logic is the same: production targets come first and labour is treated as a consumable input.

Agency Labour as Discipline

Both firms insist that agency workers enjoy the same conditions as direct employees. On paper, this may be true. In practice, across many sectors, agency labour performs a function that no formal rulebook can erase.

Agency workers know that shifts can quietly disappear and that contracts can end without explanation.

When housing is insecure, when transport is shared and when language barriers exist, collective resistance becomes difficult. This is not a moral failing of the worker. It is a structural feature of the model.

Meat-plant workplaces often become environments where speed, surveillance and silence reinforce one another.

Why This Is Not About Blaming Migrants

It is essential to be clear that workers from abroad are not the problem, they are victims of an economic and immigration system imposed without democratic consent and designed to reward exploitation.

It is equally dishonest to pretend that mass labour migration is neutral or benign. It functions as a tool of large employers, imposed without popular consent, to suppress wages, fragment workforces and weaken solidarity at the point of production.

Local workers lose bargaining power. Migrant workers lose security and dignity. Communities lose cohesion. Only the corporation gains.

A conservative instinct to oppose this arrangement is therefore entirely justified, not on cultural grounds alone, but on moral and economic ones.

A Common-Sense Conclusion

Nationalism and Republicanism are not merely concerned with flags, culture or parliaments. They are about self-determination in the fullest sense: economic, social and communal.

An economy that depends on importing a disposable workforce to sustain profit margins is not sovereign. It is dependent, brittle and unjust.

If Ireland is serious about dignity of labour, community stability and national independence, then this model cannot continue indefinitely. Ending exploitation requires more than audits and statements. It requires confronting the underlying dependency on mass labour importation itself.

It must also be stated plainly that the people of Ireland have no democratic say whatsoever in who is granted work visas to take up employment in the Six Counties. That power rests with the British state, because the Six Counties remain under British occupation. Immigration policy affecting Irish communities is decided by politicians in another country, with no accountability to the people who live with the consequences.

That is not a radical position. It is a moderate one. It is a nationalist one. It is also a Republican one.