Alongside the hotel is a dense estate of large holiday homes, to which the finishing touches are also being put. The village of Enniscrone, quiet off-season, lies just up the road. Rolling dunes and a magnificent coastline lie behind the hotel and houses, doing some justice to the grandiloquent title "Diamond Coast".

Mariusz Kopczak was in Silesia, Poland, when he heard there was work going on the hotel site, from a Polish friend already working there. A qualified carpenter with 19 years' experience, and no English, he travelled to Sligo in August last year, and was duly employed on the site - which he and his colleagues call the "Hotel Titanic".

Kopczak found himself fixing plasterboard at just under Euro6 per hour. His weekly pay was handed over in a small brown envelope with his employee number, and total pay, written on the outside.

Kopczak kept these envelopes, and kept a note of his pay and the hours he worked each week. He worked up to 78 hours per week, he says, depending on whether he was on the day shift or the night shift: the night shift was from 7pm to 6am, seven nights a week. In four months working for Liam Scott, he had one day off, he says, when he injured his toe.

Kopczak lived on site, in one of Scott's mobile homes (bought new for his employees, Scott says). He has photos of the home on his mobile phone: one shows the view out the window, of a slag heap.

Another shows his colleagues - four of them shared the home - watching a portable television, which they bought themselves.

Kopczak has a wife and four children in Poland, and hopes to bring them to Ireland. In four months working for Liam Scott, he managed to send home Euro4,400, he says - which is why he stayed on the site even after having learned that they were being paid less than the minimum wage (then Euro7.65, now Euro8.30). At Christmas, he flew home to Poland, and took advantage of the opportunity to look for work in Dublin, where he has since found a job. It pays over Euro8 per hour, he says, beaming.

Tadek (not his real name) is still working at the site, despite having seen friends leave and get better paid elsewhere.

"I met the union and I believed that we can change the conditions of work, " he says, in his apartment in Ballina. "But I've seen that the other workers don't want to change. They don't want to stick together; they want to stick to this job. For them, this is sufficient money. The problem with the site is that the majority of the workers don't speak English very well and so they have difficulty in finding another job."

Most of the workers at the site were recruited directly in Poland, he says, by a Polish person apparently acting as an agent for Liam Scott (and possibly other Irish firms).

Tadek shows the Sunday Tribune one of his pay envelopes. The figure '520' is written on it. He says he was paid Euro520 that week, because he worked overtime: he worked 14 hours per day from Monday to Saturday and eight hours on the Sunday, 92 hours in total, he says.

Marcin Kryslak and Sebastian Tabaczka both worked for Liam Scott for a few months in 2006, before finding work as painters with a contractor in Ballina. Though they are critical of the pay and conditions while working for Scott, they say they were better paid there than in their previous work in Poland.

They say they received no "extras" on their Euro5 per hour salary from Scott, apart from lunchtime soup, provided daily. The soup was a clear broth, they say, and the workers took up a daily collection themselves to pay for vegetables to put in it.

Marcin's girlfriend has joined him in Ballina, and is working at a local factory.

They say they will stay in Ireland as long as they can.

Sebastian has a wife and daughter in Poland. His wife is expecting their second child, conceived on one of his quarterly visits home. How long will he stay here? "That is difficult to answer. I want to make money for building a house in Poland."

The workers say a labour inspectorate team visited the site last October, but the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment will not confirm this. Siptu is awaiting a date for a labour court hearing to deal with alleged breaches of various employment acts. Under the construction industry registered employment agreements, all workers at the site should be paid a minimum of Euro14.17 per hour, according to Pat McCabe of Siptu.

Speaking on the telephone, Liam Scott describes complaints about pay and conditions on his sites as "hassle" and says he is thinking of going back to being "a small building company". "I don't need this grief, " he says, adding that a recent claim against him at the Labour Court was thrown out.

Aidan Lyons of the Construction Industry Monitoring Agency had taken a case against Scott's company, Liam Scott Construction Ltd, for not paying mandatory pensions for construction workers. However, it transpired in the hearing that this company was registered as a quarrying company, and so was not bound by the construction-industry pensions agreement.

Scott has, in fact, another company, Liam Scott Construction (Sligo) Ltd, which is registered as a construction company. Following the hearing being thrown out, Lyons entered into correspondence with the solicitors for the Sligo company. Lyons says the Sligo company had nobody registered in the pensions scheme, and has undertaken to become pensions compliant. If it doesn't, he says, he will take this company to the Labour Court.

When the Sunday Tribune initially spoke to Liam Scott, we agreed to defer publication of this story in order to give him opportunity to provide further comment, or documents demonstrating that he had paid his workers, as he said, Euro13 a hour including benefits. The Sunday Tribune has made numerous attempts to contact him since. He has not provided any further information.