As our tolerance levels rise, we are drip-fed more sleaze

LET’S hear it for the North Inner City Alliance, which is determined to drive Peter Stringfellow out of Dublin’s northside.

Every Thursday to Saturday the group assembles at 8pm to protest outside the Parnell St club carrying Stringfellow’s name.

“We’re not stopping until this place closes,” says Vera Brady, the local resident who started the campaign.

Brady and her colleagues failed to prevent Stringfellows from getting a licence in the District Court. But they’re making life hard for the club. Many people are reluctant to pass the picket.

The alliance is not for turning. “We don’t want a strip club operating in a residential area where large numbers of young and old people reside. And we don’t want our area to get a reputation for sleaze,” says Brady.

Hats off to them. To mount a protest against pornography or sleaze in Ireland is to risk being ridiculed as the kind of barmy reactionary memorably portrayed in an episode of Father Ted. When the film, The Passion of St Tibulus, came to town, Ted mounted a picket and brandished a placard declaring: “Down with this kind of thing.” His curate, Dougal Maguire, offered the more cautious message: “Careful, now.”

A similar situation might have arisen when the alliance attracted support from some well-meaning but extraordinarily naive individuals who decided to publicly recite the rosary, while holding statues and holy pictures, outside the club. This approach was firmly discouraged by Brady and her committee.

The pickets are now broadly-based, good-humoured affairs. Young and old take part. Brady describes her encounter with two Englishmen during a recent picket. When the men asked why they shouldn’t go into the club, she did not rely on moral arguments about the exploitation of people’s baser instincts or the abuse of women. “You’re far too handsome to go in there. You should go and find a girl of your own,” Brady told them. The tourists went away laughing. Perhaps those club owners should be very afraid.

It says a lot about our country, however, that the battle against lap dancing clubs should depend on an ad hoc committee of concerned residents.

Politicians, church, civic and business leaders have been extraordinarily inert. As a result, Ireland is lawless in this area. Lap dancing clubs apply for dance hall licences in the normal way in the District Court, under legislation that dates back to 1935.

They are not required to put anybody on notice of the particular services they intend to provide. It’s the same with sex shops. They can set up as retail outlets and there are no legal restrictions to prevent access by underage persons.

The empty, neon-lit windows that now blight our cities and towns may hint at the existence of certain restrictions but in reality there are none. These blank windows suggest a rather sinister manipulation of the public’s response. Deceived into thinking there are controls, we can be drip-fed more and more from the shop window, as our tolerance levels rise. That’s how the slippery slope works.

There are several reasons why politicians and civic leaders tolerate all this. Many think restrictions on lap dancing clubs and sex shops would be a throwback to our “repressive” past.

They fear the “prude” label and the Fr Ted caricature. They don’t want to be aligned with people who carry out public protest while reciting rosaries and wielding statues.

Of course, it would be nice if fringe elements got off the stage and allowed broad coalitions to emerge that could unite believers and non-believers on issues of common concern. Yet the presence of the fringe element doesn’t excuse the absence of the mainstream.

There is also a bizarre notion that if you ban lap dancing clubs and sex shops, you are committing an act of censorship. Don’t we cherish our constitutional guarantee of free expression, after all?

We do, but what Bunreacht na hÉireann actually provides is that the freedom of expression enjoyed by “organs of public opinion” shall not be used “to undermine public order or morality”. The same principle, applied to places of public “entertainment” such as lap dancing clubs, would surely point to restriction rather than permission.

Libertarianism is also a factor. Ban lap dancing clubs or sex shops and you commit a mortal sin against the free market, some would say. But follow that logic and you should legalise prostitution too.

In fact, all of the above arguments for tolerating lap dancing clubs rest on one big, false assumption - that the crimes involved are victimless. But Sergeant Alan Bailey of the Garda Síochána’s Operation Quest, which established in March 2003 to investigate allegations that women were being trafficked into Ireland for use in the sex industry, has no such view of lap dancing. He believes it is a gateway to the sex industry “and a total exploitation of vulnerable females”.

Bailey’s investigations into the experiences of lap dancers found a lifestyle that had a certain kind of glamour on the outside but a lot of repression on the inside. The women were completely dependant on the club owners and the management figures.

“They are strangers in a strange land,” Bailey told a Department of Foreign Affairs conference, “controlled in relation to whom they can associate with, and in debt to the clubs for the money spent in bringing them into the State and for housing them.”

This view is shared by Gerardine Rowley of Ruhama, an organisation which, for 19 years, has been working with women involved in prostitution and other forms of commercial sexual exploitation. She describes the characteristics of many of those brought over to work in the sex industry: vulnerability, low self-esteem, impoverished background, poor levels of literacy and education, and patterns of violence and abuse in their lives. In that context, she does not greet stories about sex slavery with disbelief.

“Non-national women are easier to control,” she says. “Irish women in that situation might know something or someone who could help. Non-national women don’t have such contacts or networks of respectability. Given their background, you don’t have to lock them away. Their inner strength is gone.”

The question Irish people must ask is, do we care? Or are “tolerant” and “laid-back” the new words we use to describe a state of radical detachment from the plight of others, especially foreign women caught up in lap dancing and prostitution. Don’t we even celebrate their exploiters? Peter Stringfellow got to present one of the Meteor music awards; newspaper articles describe him as an “impresario”.

Sooner or later, something must stir decent people from their inertia. Why not, for example, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin sharing a platform with the National Women’s Council of Ireland? Feminists and Church leaders don’t always see eye to eye but when it comes to concern about the exploitation of women, they have a lot in common.

Feminists talk about the “rights of women”. The Church tends to speak of the “dignity of women”. The activities of the sex industry are an affront to both.

But until the big guns roll out, we can only watch with interest the progress of the North Inner City Alliance picket.

In fact, if you are in Dublin of a Saturday evening, why not go to Stringfellows?