Slavery in Ireland - An outrage we pretend we don’t see

WE would all be offended by the suggestion that slavery is widespread in Ireland.

The charge challenges our strongly-held notion of ourselves as a modern, humane and caring European country where human rights are respected and protected.

Most of us would buck at the suggestion that anyone is held against their will in this country and forced to work as a prostitute by pimps who have, more or less, kidnapped them in their home country and turned them into sex slaves to work in brothels across Europe, including Ireland’s growing and lucrative network. Some are little more than children.

Such a terrible, exploitative, violent thing could not happen here, we — dishonestly — reassure ourselves. We do this despite a whole series of reports that have shown we are very capable of turning a blind eye to the most violent and hideous abuses right under our noses.

And we are doing it again.

In virtually every town and village, and most certainly in every city in Ireland, young foreign women are raped on a daily basis because they have fallen into the grip of crime gangs and because tens of thousands of Irish men are prepared to pay to do it.

We might like to pretend that our sensibilities are stung by the suggestion that isolated and helpless people — virtually all vulnerable young women lured here by the promise of a job — are so terribly abused under our noses but they are. And what is worse we all know they are and, once again, we turn a blind eye.

By our relative silence and inactivity we are almost as complicit in supporting this slavery as the sad, empty men who use their comparative wealth to humiliate and dominate a far less fortunate human being.

The chilling fact that not one person has even been prosecuted in Ireland for human trafficking indicts us all and must add to the agonies of those so exploited in Ireland. Not only are some of us prepared to pay to rape them but the state has shown itself incapable of confronting the traffickers who kidnap and beat to sustain their sordid business. Even if the women could escape how could they trust such a state?

That the garda unit responsible for this area declined to be even interviewed for the Irish Examiner series (pages eight and nine) on human trafficking is a worrying indication of the official mindset on this issue. It is in stark contrast to the open attitude shown by Swedish police who are far more proactive and successful in confronting the scourge.

The Government is considering legislation that would criminalise men for buying sex rather than women for selling it and this might go some way towards confronting the problem. This approach has halved street prostitution in a decade in Sweden.

In the meantime we have to accept that slavery exists in Ireland and is sustained through our money and violence and may not just be confined to the sex industry.

In a country where so many hearts have been, and are being broken, by forced emigration it is all but impossible to understand such a lack of compassion and support, such abandonment, for those forced to leave their homes in equally distressful circumstances.