Now when the Tsar of Russia
And the King of Prussia
Landed in the Phoenix in a big balloon,
They asked the police band
To play "The Wearin' of the Green"
But the buggers from the depot didn't know the tune.
So they both went up to Monto, Monto, Monto
Scarpered up to Monto, lan-ge-roo,
To you!
The old song made famous by Ronnie Drew this was written well before the world went mad. The lyric is full of fun and divilment, and nowadays its bawdy content would probably make it controversial. The world is gone mad. In my opinion this is mainly down to the media, you see somewhere along the line the media exploded. There are fragments of stories continuously flying through the air so beware as its dust particles are falling on you as I write. We have stories about everything. Politics and finance, sexual predators, paedophiles, murderers, rapists, drug addicts, human traffickers, and pimps.
Now I am around long enough to know there is no way of stopping this, the tide is very much on the way in, and all we can do is move further up the beach. However you know it is not the dust settling on my shoulders that bothers me, no it’s more the kind of dust that is lingering around the place. In their haste to inform us the media have perniciously infected everything with a syringe full of sensationalism, and for me it seems the secret formula, the gauge with which we inform our moral judgement is some kind of dilution of middleclass female respectability.
Some middleclass women are indeed very respectable but that is not the real world, as the real world is riddled with the savagery of nature,and with all of the cruelty that goes with it.
You know what I mean don’t you, with wars and starvation, and murder and torture, many of these evils happen as a direct result of land grabbing, and economic expansion, and the ruthless ambition of those we entrust with power. But we won’t go there; we will just stick with the moral sensibilities of my middleclass woman for now.
You may feel I am meandering a little but my brain got to thinking of sex workers. The days when Ronnie Drew sang about Monto and the bawdy fun and games associated with it, are long gone. What we have now is full-fledged lobbyists like Ruhama, [founded by nuns,] I kid you not, think, [Magdalene Laundries, Tuam Babies etc,] and before you say poor old nuns trying to rid our streets of desperate prostitutes? No these are serious players they can command airtime on RTE nine news, and they can spread their message unchallenged before we switch to Thurles, and the inauguration of a celibate bishop, who wants to preach about the dangers of human trafficking in a country where statistically it hardly exists.
Alongside these lobbyists we have the secular feminists. Now secular feminists make the nuns look like girl guides. They erupted in Sweden originally with a basic plan based on their fantasy view of the real world, and their obsessive hatred of men. Thus they brought in this largely discredited criminalisation of the buyers of sex doctrine that is so beloved of catholic right wing movements like Ruhama. Of course the reason it doesn’t work is that it is fantasy, like all prohibitionist policy the law is there to be broken. So when society at large criminalises something that is in demand, the criminals rub their hands with glee, and go yes we will have some of that. Logic wouldn’t be an ultra-feminists strongest attribute mind you, and so they send fragments of this failed strategy throughout society, and it is just amazing who picks up on it without question or any kind of forensic examination.
A few months back the DUP brought legislation to the Stormont parliament to criminalise the clients of sex workers. Now alarm bells should ring for all sorts of reasons. One because the whole proposal is daft and won’t work. The other is that the DUP think it’s a good idea, and have they ever had a good idea before? Incredibly they get support from the Irish Republican leftist anti austerity, remember the men of 1916 and a thirty two county socialist republic, yes folks Sinn Féin. In essence what Sinn Féin has done is voted against the civil rights of sex workers. Sinn Féin are the people who marched against the British Paratroopers to assert the rights to civil liberties, yet in an instant they have voted to deny a tiny minority of people the right to work unhindered as sex workers.
I have challenged all my SF contacts on twitter about this; I have constantly reminded them of how anti republican and anti-civil liberties their support of the DUP legislation actually is. So far I have been blocked by two accounts, and I have not received any response from anyone else. I think there are two reasons for this; one is that SF has rightly calculated that nobody gives a rats piss about dirty sex workers. Two is that people don’t like discussing sexual matters in an open forum.
That’s dirty talk the kind of bawdy stuff that Ronnie Drew sang about. Either way the brilliant FG are intending following our northern brethren’s example, and the minister intends to railroad her poorly researched legislation, so as the Irish citizen can create another sector exclusively for criminals. All under the guise of stopping sex trafficking, which has no correlation with normal sex work by the way.
It’s a wonder that smart boys like Simon Harris are not bleating on about how we should have an official IFSC type of red light district. You know we could create a red light tax haven and re-brand it as ‘Dublin’s Monto.’ Well at least if it was state run Irish prostitutes could work safely, and we could remove the criminals from the stage. But then again my middleclass female conscience wouldn’t agree.
