Her union colleague Barnaba Phillip Dorda is from Tychy in southern Poland and he believes there are over 200,000 Poles working on and off the books in Ireland . . .

putting the unofficial figure of non-nationals in Ireland at well over twice the official level of around 200,000.

Saduikyte and Dorda are Ireland's first non-national union officials, hired to organise the thousands of migrant workers who have come here since the country opened its doors to workers from the 10 new EU accession states in June 2004.

Word has now got around that Siptu has a branch for non-nationals and the numbers arriving at Liberty Hall are increasing all the time.

"Anybody who comes into Liberty Hall and speaks with a foreign accent is sent up to the second floor. The queues start from 5pm onwards in the corridors and go on until 11pm on some nights, " says Saduikyte, who came to Ireland from the town of Kaunas in Lithuania four years ago after finishing a degree in tourism.

Last week, an EU report on the numbers and destinations of migrant workers from the 10 accession states showed that, proportionally, Ireland received five times the number of workers taken in by all the other EU states and eight times the number going to the UK.

Siptu established the branch to look after nonnational workers last October and, to date, 15,000 members have signed up.

The branch is headed up by Siptu national secretary, Noel Dowling, who admits that providing advice, legal representation and translation costs can be an expensive business. He was pinned to his collar recently, he said, to get an employment regulation order for the hotel and catering industry translated into Mandarin for one of the union's new members. But Dowling says that Siptu is in this for the long haul and expects other unions to follow suit shortly.

Siptu employed Saduikyte and Dorda last November and they have since been familiarising themselves with Irish labour law. Saduikyte had never worked for a trade union before but Dorda worked for over two years in the legal section of the Polish trade union, Solidarity AT . . . a breakaway from the Solidarity union which was headed up by Lech Walesa.

"It's not easy but it's never boring, " says Saduikyte who, like Dorda, has a bulging file of cases. "Last month a fisherman in his 50s from Latvia was found sleeping on the streets in Galway with just 2 in his pocket after the fishing boat he worked on refused to pay him his wages. He ended up sleeping in a garda station but with the help of Siptu official, Tony Ayton, we managed to get him accommodation in the local asylum centre. Later, we also got his wages from the ship owners."

Language is critical, says Dorda, who also speaks Czech, Slovakian and Russian."If non-nationals can't speak the native language, they won't know their rights and this leaves them wide open to abuse by unscrupulous employers."

Saduikyte instances a case just a few weeks ago where a 21-year-old Lithuanian working in a Cork company making up salads was paid 6.10 an hour, as opposed to the national minimum wage of 7.65. She was later told that this was because she was in training. "Do you need one year's training to pack lettuce leaves into a plastic dish?" asks Saduikyte, who managed to get the young woman the full rate.

Dorda has noticed that, while non-nationals are more than happy with rates of even 4 or 5 an hour, after a few months they start to notice the better wages paid to others. "It also dawns on them how expensive it is to live in Ireland, " he says, though he believes it won't be long before non-nationals start to move up the jobs chain.

Both officials strongly disagree with Labour leader Pat Rabbitte's recent call to review Ireland's policy to give non-national workers open access to the Irish labour market. "Many of the workers here now may leave in a few years, " says Dorda."But the important thing is that it's their choice, not somebody else's."