There was shock in England last week, writes Fintan O'Toole, when it was discovered that one of the oldest and most respectable of travel agencies, Thomas Cook, has launched a new product: family tours of the red-light district of Amsterdam.
The nocturnal excursions will be open to children of all ages and the company actually boasts that "under-threes go free". They can watch prostitutes displaying their wares to would-be customers and see the whole thing as just another of the sights of the city, along with the Royal Palace, the Rijksmuseum and the Oude Kirk.
You wonder how much further the push to make the sex trade seem entirely normal and unproblematic can go. How about children's puppet heroes singing songs about the glories of the strip club? Actually, we've done that one already, here in Ireland. The big Christmas charity record for kids is Dustin the Turkey singing Patricia the Stripper with its author, Chris de Burgh. Mammies are already on the airwaves, telling us that their two-year-old daughters love to sign along and know all the words about the fat men being serviced by our heroine:
They hang around in groups
Like battle-weary troops.
One can often see the queue
Right down the street.
Because Patricia or Delicia
Not only is a singer.
She also removes all her clothing.
For Patricia is the best stripper in town . . .
The song has been around for 30 years, and when I was at college it was a big favourite with agricultural science students letting it all hang out after their third bottle of Taylor Keith red lemonade. It was anodyne, silly and relatively harmless, especially in an Ireland where stripping was something you did with old wallpaper and a flat-bladed implement.
But Ireland has changed. Now there are lap-dancing clubs in all the major towns and cities. Stringfellows, the London club which glamorises the pathetic business of young women from eastern Europe wriggling naked before middle-aged businessmen, is about to open a Dublin branch on Parnell Street, a few hundred yards from a girls' secondary school.
The exchanges between would-be models on web forums like fashion.ie include such dialogue as: "Peter Stingfellow (sic) is coming to Dublin, so if you are sick of the 9-5 job, why not try lap-dancing - would be a change."
Alan McEvoy, the Irish media and entertainment entrepreneur who is helping to bring Stringfellows to Dublin, tells the Sunday Business Post: "It is a business like any other, and the fact that it is a lap-dancing club does not faze me."
Money is money, dancing naked in front of a man for €30 for three minutes is a business like any other, and lap-dancing is a viable career option for young women. Only perverse prudes could think otherwise. In this context, what do you want your eight-year-old sons and daughters to be tuned into this Christmas?
Two national institutions with specific obligations to the welfare of children have decided that it's a song about how wonderful it is for women to take off their clothes for money.
Dustin the Turkey is a creature of RTÉ Television's hugely, and deservedly, popular kids' show The Den. He's the licensed jester, the figure who's allowed to go a bit further than parents would like. His rudeness is far more fun because it pushes a little beyond the bounds, but it's also an official, acceptable form of naughtiness.
The song has been released in aid of Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children. The message, it seems, is that strip clubs are naughty but nice, that a girl can aspire to be a stripper and a boy to be one of her clients.
Since we can't apparently afford to fund the development of a national children's hospital, we will raise money by de-sensitising our children to the notion that there might be anything dodgy about the sex industry.
Never mind that about 300,000 children are being trafficked across international borders every year, a majority to work as sex slaves. Never mind that there is substantial evidence of this kind of trafficking into Ireland. Never mind that, however careful and lawful a business like Stringfellows might be, lap-dancing clubs are the "harmless" end of an immensely harmful industry. Just get the kids together and sing along:
And with a swing of her hips
She started to strip.
To tremendous applause
She took off her drawers.
And with a lick of her lips
She undid all her clips.
Threw it all in the air.
And everyone stared.
And as the last piece of
Clothing fell to the floor
The police were banging
On the door . . .
And if the kids ask you why the police are at the door, just tell them it's political correctness.