Last Tuesday evening, the outskirts of Dublin were enclosed by a steel girdle of cars in what was probably the largest traffic jam in the State's history.
Journeys that would normally take an hour took two, three or four times that time. The M50 was a vast linear car-park in which absolutely nothing moved for hours on end. During my own highly entertaining little journey to a certain book launch, I saw not a single garda at a single junction trying to sort out of the chaos.
Could it have been that the entire force was studying brothels through tiny holes in ostentatiously opened newspapers? Were they in unmarked vans with earphones on monitoring telephone calls to check on who was making appointments with Whiplash Wanda, the Princess of Pain? Or were they themselves making phonecalls to discover how much a Swedish, a Danish or a Finnish would cost?
Moral intrusiveness
To judge from the proceedings in Dublin Circuit Court on that same morning, they could well have been doing just Olympian cretinousness with a preposterous moral intrusiveness, two adult women who employed other adult women to have paid sex with adult men were each sentenced to 18 months in prison, suspended, and fined £6,500 for running a brothel.
The mentality involved in the creation of a state-sponsored public morality to be enforced by a morality police over private citizens was splendidly summed up by the trial judge, Judge Elizabeth Dunne.
Addressing the two accused, Samantha Blandford Hutton and Karen Leahy, she said: "Both were involved in a sordid, despicable and distasteful way of making money, and they exploited those who were working for them."
Really? So is this what the State is up to? Using the criminal code to crack down on people whose personal conduct in private is regarded within the official State morality as sordid, despicable and distasteful?
In 2001, should taste, or dislike of personal behaviour, properly be a matter of law? And how did the judge get it into her learned head that the girls working for Samantha and Karen were being exploited? Did the court not hear Garda evidence that the four women who worked in their brothel had freely volunteered their services after seeing advertisements in In Dublin magazine?
Did the court not also hear that the whole operation was professional and well-organised? To be sure, the judge was only applying the law, and the garda∅ involved in this operation were similarly obeying orders, and there is of course no doubt that running a brothel is against the law. That does not mean of course that the law is now right and should be enforced. There is a vast numbers of laws which are never enforced, because they are antiquated and irrelevant. And so too are our laws on prostitution.
I must say, it is to my great personal regret that I do not know Samantha and Karen; but now they are down on their luck, and lighter by a few bob than they would like to be, they might care to have lunch with me, at The Irish Times's expense. In the meantime, I wish them well.
No sense of priorities
Only a law enforcement body which has lost a proper sense of priorities in a society where there are so many victims of personal violence and of unmanaged traffic would have spent even a single second pursuing women who were running an operation in which all participants were adults who had volunteered in response to advertisements in the public domain.
Other than making that farcical index, the "clear-up rate" look good, what is the point in criminalising consensual adult deeds which occur in private, with no victims and no complainants? Yet An Garda S∅ochβna has in recent years mounted major operations against brothels and brothel-keepers, even though individual garda∅ have frequently testified that the brothels are well-run, clean, have a set tariff for particular services, and involve girls who, far from being coerced into the sex-industry, have offered freely their services.
What is the consequence of closing these houses down? It is not the elimination of prostitution, as no society in the world throughout history has managed to achieve - even dear old Iran, where prostitutes have been buried up to their necks in the sand and stoned to death.
Back on the streets
No, when you close down brothels you simply shift the business to the streets, and authority over it to violent male pimps. And if the argument against the sex industry is that it attracts drug addicts or schizophrenics as workers, no doubt the argument might then go on to explain how the world is made a better and more honourable place by further criminalising women who are already victims, and placing them in the hands of brutal thugs.
I don't know how many garda hours are spent sleuthing after prostitutes. But, for example, I can't help wondering if a single garda on duty at the junction of Bachelor's Walk and Westmoreland Street, where cyclists seem to die under the wheels of lorries with frightening frequency, might have not proven a better use of police resources.
Which takes us back to traffic. Is there a master plan to cope with the sort of congestion which slipped a noose of steel around Dublin last Tuesday, and set off a chain-reaction across much of Leinster? But how could there be, if almost the entire force is sitting in dustbins outside knocking shops with a few kipper bones on their heads, saving civilisation from trollops?
Well, girls: Lunch?