Immigration Council of Ireland’s ‘Mothers and Daughters’ lunch invite (top) and guest speaker Noirin O’Sullivan, acting Garda Commissioner at a seminar in Farmleigh House in June.
We would like to draw your attention to the fact that the Immigrant Council of Ireland is running the “Turn Off the Red Light” (TORL) campaign, a lobby of approximately 70 organisation led by the Immigrant Council of Ireland created for the purpose of lobbying the Government to bring in new laws to ‘end prostitution and sex trafficking’ in their own words, most notably a new law to criminalise the purchase of sex between consenting adults.
For the Garda Commissioner to be guest speaker at this €100 a ticket fundraising event suggests she supports the TORL campaign.We feel this is an entirely inappropriate political position for Garda Commissioner to have taken and would ask her to pull out of this event.
We would also like to highlight that the Immigrant Council of Ireland has repeatedly advertised this Mothers and Daughters Lunch as being an event to fundraise for “women and girls who are victims of sex trafficking and prostitution”…We suspect [following apparently no response to submitted queries to the council] the money will actually be going towards the Turn Off The Red Light campaign……We write this letter as an organisation that has recorded 5,565 incidents of abuse or crime against sex workers in Ireland since 2009. Sex worker victims of crime are generally accustomed to receiving no support from An Garda Síochána and it strikes us as markedly inappropriate that the Gardaí’s disinterest in crime against sex workers is matched with such keen support of a political campaign to further criminalise sex work.
From an open letter to acting Garda Commissioner Noirin O’Sullivan by Ugly Mugs, a scheme run by sex workers “that aims to improve the safety of sex workers in Ireland and reduce crimes committed against them”.
Letter to the Garda Commissioner (UglyMugs.ie)
Also: a hundred yo yos!?
(Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland)
…the ‘charadee’ sector in Ireland don’t stay down for long…follow the money. The Ross O’Carroll Kelly parody of these shameless parasites is probably close to the mark.
they’re absolutely right to send this letter. The TORL campaign is misguided at best. The most charitable explanation of the involvement of organisations like the Immigrant Council is that they’ve learned where to find the only pots of money available to them – the trafficking bandwagon is big business for NGOs, along with terrorism it’s one of the areas governments throw money at. But actual sex workers are rarely listened to on the topic, nor are their rights respected or supported.
I agree, these NGOs are creaming it yet don’t appear to be actually helping those they purport to care about.
Not to mention Ruhama are involved in TORL. A bunch of nuns who used to run the Magdalene Laundries claiming to know what’s best for sex workers… you couldn’t make it up.
Interesting manifestation of the horseshoe theory though. I can’t think of any other issue on which radical feminists and conservative Catholics are united.
The Immigrant Council was itself founded by a nun. It’s unreal that we ignore who is actually lobbying for this, and disturbing that some of these religious NGOs get funding from the State. We basically have missionaries preying on non-nationals and sex workers in our own country at the taxpayers’ expense.
I didn’t mention Ruhama because then my rant would have gone on for ages! You’re absolutely right, it beggars belief that an organisation with their history and their current connections are taken so seriously. And there are sex workers and groups representing them trying to articulate a different argument, but they get next to no media platform. Cos apparently saving fallen women is still a more attractive narrative, even in 2014. And sure, what would sex workers know about sex work?
Mary bloody Harney. Remember her.
Who is she working for these days? Ernest &Young or Goldman Sachs?
You know I thought it was her. And wow, so good, she’s on it twice!.
My wife seems to think she ****ed off to Spain with her 130K pension – clever girl. Wouldn’t it be nice if they were all that obliging?
I understand she has some directorship of a private health care company – Cara – coz of like, her experiences as a Health Minister. I also heard she was shilling for some Indian pharmacist.
They expect Harney to eat so much at the lunch, they put her picture twice on the invitation.
Most interesting thing is that that’s Keiran Fitzgerald and Simon O’Brien of GSOC in the background behind NO’S.
Noirin, love. You’re off the clock – you can get into your civvies if ya want.
So all “sex workers” are female?
Or maybe it’s just the sisterhood that feminists care about. After all, the reason prostitutes exist is because of men. After all, being born male is like being born with frontal lobe deficiency. Being male requires treatment (and/or brainwashing by a state funded charity).
And what of all the rent boys up in the Pheonix Park?
Should there be a separate quango for them?
Right you be, what about the fellas indeed! If you’ve a hundred yo-yos to spare, you could always cross dress and head along to this event and make your feelings known.
How is your research into ‘all the rent boys up in the Pheonix (sic) Park’ going?
Rent boys? As in gay male prostitutes?
Don’t be daft man. There’s none of that sort of carry on here. You probably need to go to England for that sort of filth.
Being male is a pathology (particularly if you suffer from being white, middle class and/or “privileged”).
“After all, being born male is like being born with frontal lobe deficiency.”
Only in your case, ABM.
Uglymugs are pimps.
http://www.sundayworld.com/top-stories/crime-desk/brothel-cash-goes-to-internet-kingpin
And yet everyone on this list thinks the NGOs are only in this to get money…..
Nope, I’m pretty sure they’re doing it entirely out of a completely misguided sense of morality and the firm belief that they have the right to dictate and control how people live. They’re proxies of the Church.
The church is grannies nowadays, we need to be told what to think by a new modern, and moral leadership surely?
Impressive poster.. Mary Harney.. twice.. on an A4!
APhwoar?
The Live Register made a doc on TORL campaign and claims, readers might find it useful and (hopefully) interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSANZqdunuE
My eyes, my eyes! That font is horrid.
As an aside, we seem to be served up plenty of the toothy-grinned Acting Commissioner of late.
Some sort of charm offensive given recent difficulties in AGS?
If we can have this, can we not have our own Mother Boy?
“This is event is 18+ only”??
The lack of punctuation and centred layout is disappointing, as is the line-break after ‘sex’.