Hidden camera footage shot by undercover reporters shows women from rural areas of Romania being offered for sale to be brought back to Ireland to work as prostitutes. The disturbing footage will be aired on tomorrow night's Prime Time Investigates, which will examine the nature of the Irish sex industry.

Undercover reporters were offered two young women for sale by a Romanian man after claiming that they wanted to bring local girls back to Ireland. The negotiations were captured on hidden cameras and the footage was subsequently handed over to local police, who are currently investigating the incident.

Prime Time will also screen interviews with convicted human traffickers, who speak openly about their attempts to smuggle women out of Romania and into the sex trade in western Europe. The women are told that they will be given legitimate jobs but are forced to work as prostitutes.

They are not allowed to leave their apartments and are beaten when they refuse to have sex with clients.

"When somebody beats a girl, I mean in this trade, when he beats a girl, he beats her to scare the others, to prevent them from trying to escape or to hide money, " says Orvidio, a convicted trafficker. "They are beaten badly . . . kicks to the mouth, to the liver."

While there are no figures available for the number of women who have been trafficked into Ireland, agencies that work with prostitutes say that it is becoming more widespread.

According to Geraldine Rowley of Ruhama, there are "a couple of hundred" women working in the sex industry in Ireland who have been trafficked here by criminals.

Ireland is the only country in the EU that has not yet made the trafficking of women for the purposes of sexual exploitation a crime.

Lina, a young Lithuanian woman, tells Prime Time how she was brought to Ireland to work as a prostitute but found herself enslaved in a town in the midlands. She managed to escape back to Lithuania, where she has recently given birth to a child conceived with a client in Ireland.

"I did my job almost for free, " she says. "They paid me very little money.

I was told I had to cover the cost of my trip to Ireland. Even after one year, they still said I owed them money."

Amnesty International has been highly critical of the Irish government's failure to introduce anti-trafficking legislation. "The fact that trafficking is not criminalised sends out a signal first and foremost that trafficking is not really a concern, that victims of trafficking are not really victims of a terrible human rights abuse, " said Fiona Crowley of Amnesty. "In order to send a clear signal to traffickers, but also to the victims of trafficking that this is something that matters to the Irish government, legislation criminalising the offence of trafficking must be adopted as a priority."