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)