Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

I said "in public". That provision exists.

Different sections of the 1993 Act refer to soliciting or importuning for purposes of prostitution, loitering for purposes of prostitution, organisation of prostitution, living on earnings of prostitution and brothel keeping. There are other aspects as well but they were the first few I could point out that are relevant to some of the issues that have been raised here.

With regard to Senator Mullen's amendment, we have already discussed the question of availing of the sexual services of a trafficked person. My amendment creates a new offence of soliciting or importuning of such a person, as was discussed earlier. This amendment goes beyond the parameters of trafficked persons and seeks to criminalise, I assume, the purchase of sex from a prostitute. In other words, it is a prostitution measure rather than a trafficking measure. As such it should be considered as part of a public debate on prostitution and any changes to the law that would result from the debate could be accommodated in appropriate legislation. That does not take away from the obvious necessity to deal with this issue, a major concern to people.

The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform keeps under continuing review the laws on prostitution, as well as the laws in other countries. It approaches the laws of prostitution from several angles, including the nuisance caused by public soliciting, the safety of prostitutes, ensuring the laws on controlling organised prostitutes are working satisfactorily and the advertising of prostitution. Those issues were referred to by Senator Donohue as well.

The law does not take a moral stand on consensual activity between adults in private. In recent years calls have been made to criminalise the purchase of sex, which this amendment purports to do, and decriminalise the sale of sex. The stated purpose of this policy is to reduce the instance of prostitution by criminalising demand.

We must ask ourselves if such a policy works where it has been tried. There are conflicting statistics and opinions on the effectiveness of criminalising demand but one thing is clear. Demand does not disappear but is displaced. It goes from the streets to the Internet, to mobile telephones, to hotel rooms and apartments. It is displaced to neighbouring countries and likely to other countries as well.

In his introductory remarks, Senator Mullen referred to technology such as the Internet and mobile telephones, along with hotel rooms. I will refer later to Sweden, as Senator O'Donovan mentioned it earlier. It is easy to quote figures showing the success of criminalising the purchase of sex. It is just as easy to produce figures showing that it is premature to come to any conclusions. It has been claimed that the number of street prostitutes in Sweden has halved since the law was changed. The Swedish Government has estimated that the number of prostitutes in Sweden has dropped from 2,500 to 1,500 since 1999. Many have disputed those figures, including a social anthropologist who has studied Swedish prostitutes over the past ten years.