Some domestic staff are earning as little as Euro112 a month for an 80-hour week, according to the Migrants Rights Centre, which represents domestic workers in Ireland, who are predominantly Filipino.

Many of the workers are also set unreasonable tasks and heavy workloads and threatened with deportation if they complain, said the centre.

But now, under a voluntary Code of Practice to protect employees in the home, domestic workers hired by families will have to be provided with a written statement of their terms and conditions of employment, specifying their hours of work, rates of pay, duties, holiday entitlements and travel arrangements.

Employers will be required to safeguard the workers' "right to privacy" within the home.

Employers will also not be able to keep the workers' passports - a common enough practice by employers in an effort to retain control over the domestic worker.

In one recent case, a domestic worker was charged Euro500 for the return of her passport so she could return to her home country.

Also under the code, the cost of any accidental breakages cannot be deducted from the workers' wages as is frequently the case. But Siobhan O'Donoghue of the Migrants Rights Centre (MRC) was critical of the fact that the new code is not legally enforceable.

"The decent home owners will abide by the terms of the code in any case, while the unscrupulous employer, which is the target of the code, can ignore it, " she said.

Government, unions and employers had considered the possibility of introducing legally enforceable minimum wages and conditions of employment for home workers.

But it was unclear whether government-appointed labour inspectors would have the legal right to enter a private home to check whether such wages and conditions are being implemented.

"The Government could have found a way around the legal issue if the political will was there, " said O'Donoghue.

The MRC's Domestic Workers' Support Group is currently staging an exhibition in the Gallery of Photography in Temple Bar, Dublin on domestic workers' experiences in Ireland. The exhibition runs to 5 April.

"This is a sector where migrant ethnic women dominate, and the isolation, invisibility and poor regulation of this employment mean that they are at greater risk of exploitation" said the group.