Do you often feel these days that you've woken up in a country you know absolutely nothing about? The accents and the geography are familiar, to be sure; tourists are still told that O'Connell Street is the widest main street in Europe and that the purest English in the world is spoken in Ireland; and a brief drive around the country will assure you that Athlone still stands athwart the Shannon, that the Cliffs of Moher are as terrifyingly spectacular as they always have been, and the weather is as godawful as ever it was in de Valera's day.
These are oddly reassuring certainties to cling to when you try to come to terms with other things in Irish life - such as a young woman being kidnapped from one of those gracious Georgian streets we're so proud of, hooded and driven 30 miles, where she is gangraped and handcuffed to a tree. This sounds more like the conduct of deranged extraterrestrials rather than men from the island of Ireland as we have hitherto understood it.
Prostitutes
But deeply troubling as these events are, in a way, even more troubling is the sheer size of the group to which this young girl belonged. She is a prostitute; and if you had asked me earlier this week, before the events described above, I would have said there were maybe 50 prostitutes working the streets of Dublin - and I would have thought that a very high number indeed. But I would have been wrong.
As Jim Cusack and Judith Crosbie reported the other day, some 600 women prostitutes work the Baggot Street and Benburb Street regions of Dublin alone. Six hundred. That is simply an extraordinary figure; and it doesn't include the many women working in massage parlours - to judge from the advertisements, at least as many. What is truly unbelievable about their trade is not them - after all, for the most part they are unfortunate drug addicts, and junkies will do almost anything for money. No, what I find troubling are the clients: who are they? Why on earth would anyone want to pay a woman who regards him with utter contempt to perform some sexual act for him, in which the only guarantee is that she will get absolutely no pleasure from it?
So what's the point? Would you not actually pay a very large amount of money to avoid having a sexual liaison with a person who despised you, who might well be fatally diseased, who is addicted to drugs, who is grossly sexually promiscuous and who certainly and invariably finds the commercial sexual deed perfectly repulsive? Surely the appetite for such sexual transactions must be extremely marginal - on a par, say, with yearnings to be eaten by alligators or have a double-decker bus park on one's foot?
Transactions
Time to do some sums. Presuming the street-girls each have five clients a day, at least 3,000 men each day actually hand over money to engage in this emotionally dysfunctional, loathsome and potentially lethal form of sexual activity. Recognising that though the Lord observed the Sabbath, working girls probably don't, that means at least 21,000 of these bizarrely grotesque transactions occur every week. It is simply astounding.
Moreover, if we take into account the massage parlours and double the turnover, we could be talking about over 40,000 men a week, or 2 million commercial sexual encounters a year. Not in New York or Rio, but in Dublin. And suddenly I find that I know nothing whatever about a sizeable aspect of the society in which I live, or indeed about the emotions or the urges of so many men. You really don't have to be much of a sandal-wearing New Male to wonder whether Men-Hating Feminists might sometimes not have a point or two.
That doesn't mean our laws criminalising such behaviour are not idiotic: adults have the right to do what they want with their bodies - no matter how foolish or disgusting others might think it. It's not the job of police forces to impose a consensual morality upon citizens. In fact, the attempt to do so with our anti-prostitution laws serves only to further marginalise young heroin addicts who need protection from the State, not criminalisation.
Huge population
Rather tellingly, the presence of an entire body of laws has failed to prevent the emergence of a huge population of working girls, their pimps and their punters. But how did this happen? Is prostitution not supposed to be a hallmark of great poverty and sexual denial? So how did this prostitute-dependent population come into existence, amid so much affluence and sexual permissiveness? Who are all these people? Most of all, who are the thousands of men who consort with prostitutes, 85 per cent of whom have communicable diseases? These men come from a strange island I know nothing of.
That same island produced the creatures who earlier this week abducted, hooded, and raped, and left manacled to a tree an innocent young girl whom the laws of the island had already dictated should be marginalised and criminalised. That same island sentenced Robert Melia, who serially beat, raped and knifed prostitutes, to a mere nine years in prison - increased to 12 years on appeal from the DPP - despite his earlier convictions for identical crimes. It's become an odd country, this island. A very odd country, with some very odd people indeed: and those odd people are all men.