What matter if crimes against the person were up 130 per cent within the year? Who cares if on any given day across the country over 3,000 people are treated in hospital as a result of criminal assaults? These are trivial matters compared with the really serious problem in Irish life: massage parlours.
We should all rejoice that even as crimes of violence spiralled almost out of control, with every single index suggesting that this country has gone from being abnormally peaceful to being actually quite dangerous, gardaí are diverting precious resources into closing down knocking-shops.
Just the ticket.
And perhaps when every brothel and every massage parlour and every house of ill repute is closed down, and every girl who sells sexual services for a living is in jail, and every street is swept clear of prostitutes, and Ireland is free of hookers, strumpets, tarts, harlots, whores and trollops, we can open a consultancy service for other countries. Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia - they could all learn from us about how deal with the scourge of vice.
Powerful deterrent
But if the present Garda campaign doesn't work, maybe we could in the meantime learn from them, and in all sorts of ways. Stoning to death is said to be a pretty powerful deterrent. You don't even need a good throwing arm and steady eye, since the hooker is normally buried up to her neck, enabling the righteous to stone her to death from point-blank range. If we did it in the green in Fitzwilliam Square, every second Sunday, say, and charged admission to watch, the whole enterprise would be self-financing.
Better still, it could give our athletes a bit of live firing practice, for nothing sharpens a javelin-thrower's or a shot-putters appetite like the notion that, even as they tone up their muscles by killing these dreadful women, they are cleaning up society. Athletes have a social conscience too, you know: they like to do their bit, and the only real argument against deploying them against these little lines of weeping heads in the ground is that they might kill the girls too quickly.
There are indeed many handy little tricks we might learn from other countries, other cultures. In Jordan, for example, a woman who is raped is considered to have dishonoured her family; because as we all know, if a woman is raped she must, perforce, be a prostitute. And so the only thing that her brothers and uncles can do in these circumstances is, of course, kill her. Well, naturally: what else do you do with a harlot? In the imperfect state of the law in Ireland, it is still illegal to kill prostitutes. Heaven knows why.
Penthouse Pets
Fortunately, the State can imprison them, and hound them, and harry them, as it can those who organise them and give them premises to operate from, and as it did two fine young women Samantha Hutton and Karen Leahy last year. They were sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment (suspended) and fined £6,500 each in Dublin Court for running a brothel called Penthouse Pets.
I must say, these girls certainly made it easy for Garda in its crackdown on major crime (violent attacks up 130 per cent, manslaughter up 40 per cent, but by God, we've got the tarts on the run). They actually took out magazine advertisements describing Penthouse Pets as a massage parlour, and presumably a few sleuths from the Vice Squad, using much intuition, and deploying to the full all the training they got in Templemore, and ably calling upon the vast resources of the new multi-million-pound Garda computer, brainstormed their way to the idea that maybe sex was for sale in Penthouse Pets massage parlour.
It's called lateral thinking. See these intellectual comets streaking across the night sky of crime, clearing all before them! But without detracting from the super-Sherlocks who tracked down these Moriartys of sexual crime, Mlle Hutton et Mlle Leahy, is it not a shame other criminals do not advertise their services the way they did? It would do wonders for the annual crime figures, and free up even more gardaí for Operation Gladiator, the utterly laudable crackdown on vice.
At the time of their trial, I invited the girls out to lunch. The offer is now withdrawn, not because they didn't reply to me - they didn't - but because this newspaper cannot afford to buy lunch for anyone any more. Instead, these days, around 1 p.m., the Editor enters the newsroom and ceremoniously unwraps a cream cracker, sharpens the Irish Times carving knife, and carefully divides the biscuit between us all; and though I am generous to a fault, I have no intention of sub-dividing my share with Karen and Samantha.
Ancient taboo
Short commons aside, they have done no harm to anyone; but they have violated an ancient taboo, for which civilisations have been hounding, lynching and jailing innocent women throughout history. For we know now what draws many women to prostitution: apart from those who have made the careful adult choice to sell their bodies for sex, perhaps most sex-workers are schizophrenic, or were sexually-abused in childhood, or are addicts.
Clearly, all admirable targets for police action, especially since Irish feminists will, very studiously, not defend them. Principle runs deep, but prudery deeper: good girls, feminists of Ireland. So a request, please: when finally we introduce the admirable and long overdue Islamic punishment for whoredom, may feminists alone be given the task of stoning a harlot buried up to her neck to death? Why? Because however hard they tried, they'd miss.