Seven Portlaoise schoolgirls have set themselves up as arms dealers to highlight the failure of Irish law to regulate the trade.
The students worked with Channel 4 for the past six months on a Despatches programme to demonstrate how easy it is to broker small arms and torture tools from a base in Ireland.
Working from a makeshift office in Presentation school Portlaoise, Co Laois, they successfully passed themselves off as arms traders seeking to buy pistols, leg irons and stun batons.
"Arms brokers work like estate agents; by acting as middlemen who introduce buyers and sellers to each other," the students' teacher, Sister Barbara Raftery, explained at a press conference yesterday.
"The seller could be in China, the buyer a police state anywhere and the broker based in Dublin or Cork. It saddens me that Ireland is the only EU country with no controls on arms brokering."
Margaret Hyland (17) said she had no difficulties buying a stun baton capable of delivering a 5,000 volt shock from a supplier in South Korea. The company even asked if the Irish students would act as a local agent.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Trade said it was preparing export control legislation which would for the first time regulate arms brokering in Ireland and by Irish citizens abroad.
