Where have all our cleaners gone? From Brazil to Latvia, from Lithuania to Poland, they came to us in their thousands. Broad-shouldered women born of communism and dictatorships seeking a better life armed with only a dustpan, brush and mop. They came to conquer a new world, to seek out an untidy civilisation, to boldly go where no house coat from Riga had gone before. They came, they cleaned -- now they've gone missing. Was it something we said, or do these non-Irish cleaners whom we loved so much know something about the economy that we don't? Up and down the country, women folk are reporting their cleaners to the local gardai as missing persons. Last week, I called into a friend to find her busily hoovering her front room in preparation for the arrival of her Brazilian cleaner. It was a pathetic sight. Not the fact that...
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