Rónán Mullen (Independent)

Having listened to the Minister of State's explanation of the Government's position, I know her heart is in the right place.

However, it seems very much to be a case of "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet". The Government is exuding a lot of support for the good intentions behind the proposal, but it is advancing some pretty thin arguments as to why it should not take the step reasonable people think it should take.

I draw attention to two points. First, the motion contains a bizarre warning - I am not sure from what kind of civil servant mentality it springs - against "the possible prosecution of individuals in circumstances in which a gift is given to a person with whom they had a sexual encounter". That is a perverse, twisted argument to make and it could equally be applied to drug taking. One could say we will not prosecute anybody for taking payment for giving someone drugs because they might have taken them together and one might have given the other a gift at the end. That argument insults our intelligence and calls the Government's bona fides into question.

The second point is that although I do not blame the Minister of State for it, I consider as bogus the reference to strict liability being an issue. I look forward to hearing Senator Ivana Bacik's contribution on this point. If one examines the jurisprudence, the decisions of the courts and the various arguments made, I do not believe the courts have in any sense found there is a problem with strict liability offences per se in circumstances where what we are dealing with is an offence in the context of activity which is against public policy. The only difficulty I see is that the President might be tempted to refer the legislation to the Supreme Court for a ruling on its constitutionality under Article 26. The Minister of State should not worry about this prematurely, as it would be possible to get around it and legislate for strict liability offences in the way proposed.

I ask the Minister of State to consider the difference between the 200 and 20,000. Which would she prefer - the situation in Stockholm where only 200 women are currently involved in prostitution because it is a crime to purchase sex, or the situation in Barcelona where 20,000 are involved? A Swedish police officer, Detective Superintendent Jonas Trolle, participated in the recent round table seminar organised by Ruhama and the Immigrant Council of Ireland in order to brief various stakeholders such as the Garda, the HSE, the PSNI and so on. He made the point that prostitution was always connected with organised crime.

There are two reasons we should criminalise the purchase of sex. One is that by so doing we would help to make this country a cold house for traffickers, those who traffic others for the purposes of sexual or other forms of exploitation. There are those who argue that what one is trying to do in criminalising the purchase of sex is to target prostitution in order to deal with the narrower problem of trafficking. Reference was rightly made by Senator Fiach Mac Conghail to the British legislation. Some progress has been made in the United Kingdom because the British have provided for the concept of strict liability, whereby it is not a defence for a person to say he or she did not know the person from whom they purchased sex was an exploited person or subject to exploitation. That is going much further than we dared to go a few years ago in the human trafficking legislation in Ireland, legislation to which I tabled an amendment. It was pointed out at yesterday's briefing which I found helpful that a problem with the British law was that because one was required to prove a person had been trafficked, this made the burden of proof more difficult and that it was relatively onerous to secure prosecutions in circumstances where it was a summary offence. That is why the two issues are fite fuaite, interconnected. By targeting prostitution per se - the purchase of sex from others - one targets an activity from which traffickers and other criminals profit.

The second reason is that we would be targeting a social evil. The truth is that the sex industry lies to people as well as about people. It lies when it states people are absolutely free to do what they want with the bodies of others, provided certain technicalities are complied with to do with age and consent. We had discussions in this country recently about the importance of maintaining respect for the age of consent. Consent is a very difficult issue to assess, but there are categories in society which we know must be protected by insisting that in certain circumstances one simply cannot consent to something. The sex industry lies, therefore, when it pretends there is meaningful consent where a person from a background of poverty and perhaps abuse has been coerced or lured by the promise of a better life and is then gradually or perhaps quickly disabused of the notion she had about having a better and dignified life in a new and strange country by being deprived of access to family, friends, a common language or networks of support and protection. The sex industry lies when it states some good can be achieved for persons with a disability or who are socially inhibited by permitting them to purchase sex from others involved in prostitution. It lies when it denies that much deeper care is called for in all of these situations.

It comes down in the end to what we consider what the law should be about. Is it to be about the bare minimum of rules to allow members of society to enjoy maximum freedom and enjoyment of their lives and opportunities, or is it about something more proactive and protective, something which intervenes to secure social good for people, including their protection at the deepest level? There is a real danger we could minimise the concept of harm compared to issues we can easily identify such as rape or murder when we can see that a person has been harmed. I am often reminded of the phrase Slayer of the Soul, the title of a book by Stephen Rossetti to describe the impact of child abuse. Prostitution is also a murky area of life that involves people's souls being destroyed. It was the columnist Breda O'Brien who asked in The Irish Times a few years ago what young girl grew up with an aspiration to some day to become involved in prostitution. What personal stories lie behind the technical consent given by a person involved in prostitution? What sickness is there in our society that, at a minimum, we do not see that we should discourage and criminalise behaviour which involves the instrumentalisation, the use and abuse, of another person in this most intimate and significant area of their lives, namely, their sexuality?

We have to get away from the laddish individualism that pretends that what we are dealing with are two consenting adults who decide to engage in a contract with each other. One can contract obligations in the sale of goods in certain circumstances, but one should never be allowed to try to induce another to contract in such a way as not to show fundamental respect for their basic human dignity. That is what is involved when we propose we should criminalise the purchase of sex from persons involved in prostitution. One is saying pimps and the users of persons involved in prostitution should be allowed to induce persons from an extremely victimised background to contract to avoid their entitlement to respect for their human dignity. It is an absolutely intolerable proposition.