Mr. Brian Killoran:

Public awareness has increased in recent years but most people would be surprised to hear that it occurs in every town and village, unfortunately. By its nature, trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation is for the most part organised by organised crime gangs, Irish and international. These gangs often work in collaboration. They move women around on a regular basis and make it difficult for the women to escape.

Garda investigations tend to be part of international investigations involving Interpol and Europol and are large and complex in nature. Council law centre staff have to be conscious that those who come to us are often some of the worst cases. These are the ones that come to our attention. We have seen cases of identification of victims of trafficking taking up to two years. Often, we will go to the High Court for judicial review to review the whole process and try to find out why it is taking so long. One of the primary problems is looking at trafficking through the lens of immigration or seeing it as an immigration phenomenon.

Trafficking can of course occur with EU nationals who enjoy freedom of movement as well, who do not necessarily have an immigration issue but are caught up in this system anyway. Although trafficking often and mostly involves migrants, we have to move our perception of it from being an immigration issue to an approach similar to that around gender-based violence, in that we need to be much quicker in identifying victims of trafficking and putting supports in place around them.

As for the numbers of victims of trafficking over the past few years, the State engaged in 90 investigations of victims of trafficking in 2016 and 115 investigations in 2017. These investigations were split roughly evenly between labour exploitation and sexual exploitation, although there were slightly more sexual exploitation investigations. While the official 2018 statistics have not yet come out, it looks like there will be a further increase on the 2017 figure. We are seeing an increase in prevalence and detection, but we are not seeing an increased level of conviction of traffickers, which is the biggest single issue. We have very close contact with the Garda, including the Garda National Protective Services Bureau, GNPSB, and the immigration authorities and I do not think the low conviction rate is because of a lack of willingness on their parts. The problem of identification hampers their ability to investigate effectively because they spend so long trying to work out the identity of a victim of trafficking that it takes from their overall powers of investigation. That needs to be reformed entirely and the Garda needs to focus on investigation so it can convict traffickers.

The Garda is very conscious of the international criticism it has received because of the fact that we have not yet convicted a trafficker in Ireland. That is a massive area. While all these complex responses are going on at State level, people are often sitting in direct provision, essentially going through the motions, trying to get into a position of recovery and trying to get their lives back on track. These administrative arrangements built around it often hamper those people's ability to get back from a horrific situation into one of having dignity and the ability to be on their own two feet again. We have the component parts of a good response to victims of trafficking, and we have the will, but we are lacking a clarity of approach and resources put behind it. Things like the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2017, which decriminalises women in these circumstances but targets buyers, are very important but they need to be properly implemented as well. We are only seeing the initial stages of implementation on that particular legislation. It is a complex area, but I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it at length.