IRISH trade unionists and communists urged have urged workers to defy the Establishment and vote Leave next week.

Former Irish Congress of Trade Unions Northern Ireland Committee (NIC-Ictu) chair Joe Bowers went head-to-head with Ictu assistant general secretary Peter Bunting in a debate organised by Craigavon Trades Council on Thursday night.

Mr Bowers criticised the support of Ictu and the British TUC for the Remain campaign.

He pointed out that it was at odds with the TUC’s 2015 Congress resolutions deploring the imposition of Brussels’s austerity agenda on Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Italy, “as well as refugees like those fleeing oppression and war on Europe’s southern borders.”

“The negligence in not fully explaining existing trade union policy is contributing to a vacuum which is being filled by shrill xenophobic voices,” Mr Bowers said.

Mr Bunting conceded that Ictu does not fully support the EU, but he characterised the debate as a leadership contest between British Prime Minister David Cameron and Tory Leave campaign leader Boris Johnson — claiming the latter would be worse then the former.

Meanwhile the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) slammed Fine Gael Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Irish Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin and several of his TDs ahead of their trip to Britain to persuade Irish nationals in the country to vote Remain.

CPI general secretary Eugene McCartan said their intervention in British affairs “at the behest of the Cameron government” exposed “their subservient relation to the EU and the big business Establishment.”

Mr McCartan said the Irish citizens Mr Kenny and Mr Howlin were appealing to “were forced out of their own country by the very policies imposed by the EU and implemented by the internal troika of Fine Gael, the Labour Party and Fianna Fail.”

“This resulted in savage austerity, the cutting of public services, a growing housing crisis, with the threatened privatisation of water and turning our people into permanent debt slaves,” he said.

Mr McCartan urged Irish people in Britain to “ignore them as they have ignored you,” saying a Leave vote was “an act of solidarity with working people across Europe.”