A meeting which a group of South African immigrant workers hoped would save their jobs on an ESB project in Co Mayo failed to take place this afternoon.
The workers waited four hours in Castlebar to meet representatives of one of the companies involved in hiring them but they failed to turn up.
Tonight, the Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment which issued the workers' permits, said it would look sympathetically at re-issuing new permits if they were to find alternative employment, as it did not want to see them being forced to return to South Africa.
Earlier, the Mayor of Castlebar, Councillor Michael Kilcoyne, who is also chairman of the Consumers' Association, called for an immediate investigation by the Department of Enterprise and Employment. He said the ESB could not walk away from their responsibilities to the South African workers.
A spokesman for the ESB told RTÉ it was not a matter for the ESB. He said it was a matter for McAlpine and the staff involved, and that all ESB contracts met national and international employment legislation.
The workers were hired in South Africa by two UK based companies, McAlpine Utility Services and Short Term Engineers, to work on the ESB Network Upgrading Scheme. They say they are now stranded in Ireland neither jobs, nor money.
Anthony Friedrichs from Durban told RTÉ News that they had been treated appallingly. He said the only excuse they were given was that the contracting companies told them it would take too long to train them fully, and it was cheaper to let them go.
He said many of the 20 had sold their houses and all they owned in South Africa to come to Ireland on the promise of a year's work and the prospect of a better life.
Some of them had worked with the main electricity supply company in South Africa, and they rejected suggestions that they were insufficiently qualified for the job they had been hired for.
