Rónán Mullen (Independent)

I wish to share my time with Senator Mooney.

I welcome the Minister to the House and welcome his words. None of us can expect to dictate his precise point of view on the issues, but we appreciate his ongoing commitment to debating this issue personally with us in the House and to hearing what the House has to say. The Minister is an ideas person and he is clearly taking a considered approach to this issue. I welcome his commitment to maximum consultation and eventual publication of the report. That is important and it is to the Minister's credit.

We have moved on since the last time this debate took place. I give credit to the Taoiseach's nominees, who introduced this motion. In the previous Seanad I tabled certain amendments to the human trafficking Bill to deal with the problem of trafficking and the need to criminalise the purchasers of sex. When I introduced a Private Members' motion on the issue, I had to deal with a certain cynicism in the corridors of power. I remember one senior Minister saying, when I asked for support for the proposition that we introduce legislation according to the Swedish model, that there were young students making a few quid by going into prostitution. I remember thinking what a glib and laddish assertion that was, and how far removed it was from the reality of the lives of people in prostitution - people who have been trafficked, who are often subject to violence, who can be raped with impunity, who do not have any friends or contacts and who may not even have the language to reach out for the necessary help. Some of this horror was brought out in the film "Trafficked", which some of us saw a few years ago.

The issue with regard to the criminalisation of the purchase of sex has to do, in part, with helping to make this country a cold house for traffickers, as I have said before. However, it also has to do with an honest assessment of what prostitution itself does to individuals and what it does to a society. The Minister himself mentioned, with great sensitivity, that this is an extremely old problem. He is right to say that, but often that can be allowed as an excuse not to tackle a problem. Incest is also an extremely old problem; sadly, the laws against incest do not prevent it from happening. We are always limited in our ability to reach, through the criminal law, the evils in our midst but we should be in no doubt that where a person engages in the purchase of another human being, he or she is committing a violence against the dignity of that person and against society in general. He or she is undermining the kind of healthy egalitarian attitudes we need to promote between men and women.

What we heard today, thanks to Paul Maguire, was particularly chilling. I give credit to the media for their role in this issue. They have been subject to legitimate criticism in recent times but this is one of the areas in which it has done us a service. It was particularly chilling to hear that among those using and abusing persons in prostitution are people as young as 19, 20 or 21 years of age. That points to a radical individualism in our society, which is a problem, and perhaps even an allergy to any consideration of the moral issues around sexual morality, in particular. Perhaps because of the excesses of, and the wrong way we went about discussing some of these issues in the past, there is almost a free for all now. That is very troubling when one thinks of the impact of it.

I pay tribute again to all those involved. Tribute has rightly been paid to Ruhama. I regret the reference to sex workers which would tempt me to oppose the Government's amendment. It should at least be in inverted commas. It is a sanitisation of something that is highly unacceptable. However, this is a great improvement on the previous Government amendment and I hope the next time we have a debate, there will be nothing at all offensive in the Government's amendment.