Homosexual is quite chic these days. Senator David Norris has made quite a successful political career out of his sexual orientation, and we should be grateful. Without his witty and spirited campaigning over years, today we might still be burdened with the brutally stupid laws against male homosexual acts - though of course it took action in European Courts to move our judiciary and our elected politicians into a civilised stance on this matter.
Not that David set out to be chic, but that is what he, and the cause of homosexual law reform, became, though I'm sure it was not easy for him. But now he is something of a media pet, and he can be relied on to be sharp and clever and almost infinitely quotable. But alas, it does not end there: the very legislation which finally liberated male homosexuals from the threat of criminal prosecution for doing what, after all, comes naturally, simultaneously increased the marginalisation and criminalisation of a group of people who are not represented by flamboyant senators, who are not likely to be Joycean scholars, and from whose ranks few artists, musicians, writers and journalists are recruited.
No reminders
We are of course talking about prostitutes, two of whom have been murdered in Dublin in 18 months. No whores in the Seanad, no hookers, no trollops, no tarts, no slags, no harlots, no street-girls, no ladies of the night; in other words, no reminders within the Oireachteas of the actual reality of what prostitutes must go through. And what they must go through has been made considerably more unendurable by the very piece of law which largely freed David Norris and other homosexuals from the threat of criminalisation - the Criminal Law (Sex Offences) Act, 1993.
I say largely, because some of the Victorian reprobation of male homosexuality rather than female remained in the Act. Section Four declared that a male person who commits or attempts to commit an act of "gross indecency" with another male person under the age of 17 shall be guilty of an offence and liable to two years imprisonment. "Gross indecency" between females of any age is not proscribed: yet we know from the reality of teenage life that by the age of 17 most adolescents will have engaged in the forms of sexual activity, homosexually or heterosexually, which in the contemptible 1993 Act were outlawed for males only.
This same wretched piece of legislation placed on prostitutes additional penalties, the makeweight for the feminist lobby (which often enough you can translate into the nanny lobby) being that male importuners are also susceptible to the same penalties. Not that there is actual equality of treatment even in this transparent attempt at token-egalitarianism: the women who work the streets are on the job for hours, and vulnerable to arrest for hours; a client need only be there for a couple of minutes.
The penalty for habitual prostitution is one month's imprisonment and a £500 fine; and the penalty for running a brothel, in which as we have seen in other countries it is possible for prostitutes to be protected, in which their health may be safeguarded, and in which there may be safety in numbers, can be a £10,000 fine and five years' imprisonment.
Draconian laws
Far from consenting adults being free to do what they want with their bodies, the State has assembled newly intrusive and rigorously draconian laws, which, if applied, could make the lives of prostitutes unbearable.
But that is where the famous recipe for Irish solutions for Irish problems comes in: the law is barely enforced. It was not designed for enforcement. In fact, so far as I can see it is not being enforced at all. It was designed to make a public declaration by our elected representatives that they condemn harlotry: they were throwing the first stone.
Throwing the first stone at loose women has been a commonplace through history, and often enough that first stone has been thrown by another woman, (though no doubt it was just a coincidence that the architect of this abominable piece of legislation was Maire Geogheghan-Quinn). Are we unique in Europe that in the last decade of the 20th century we have actually increased the penalties for being a prostitute, and legally revived the hypocritical traditions of the ducking stool and the sanctimonious stone-throwing mob?
Ludicrous prices
Poor Sinead Kelly had a truly terrible end, in which this State played a major part. We introduced laws against heroin, which we then did not enforce, allowing a vast criminal underworld to develop in working class estates. Yet paradoxically, criminalisation is what makes heroin so very expensive: addicts like Sinead therefore found themselves having to pay ludicrous prices for a commodity which is absurdly cheap to manufacture.
The only way she could earn the money to pay for her addiction was to go on the game; and by so doing, instantly moved further to the margins of society, selling her body on a grubby canal-bank. In this sordid and pitiful story, it was good to hear what I had expected to hear: that gardai did their best to ensure the safety of her and those like her who work the Grand Canal.
But their improvised and benignly discretionary neglect of a stupid law is not good enough. The absurd legal apparatus of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 1993 should be dismantled, both in the sexist legislation which criminalises sexual activity amongst teenage boys, but not amongst teenage girls, and in the criminalisation of prostitutes in society.
We are going to have to grow up. It is not a question of liking prostitution, but one of accepting the reality that brothels must be licensed, and that those who work in them are respected as equal citizens before the law, who have the right to protection, to safety, to medical examinations and to a roof over their heads as they work. And we should not have to wait for a senatorial prostitute to be elected before we begin in law to protect the most vulnerable.