Amid growing concern over the massive influx of foreigners into Ireland, a “Women’s Coalition on Immigration” launched this week to pressure the government in Dublin to prioritise the safety of women and girls and to disclose migrant sex crime rates.
Barrister and parliamentary candidate Laoise de Brún said that she was compelled to convene the Women’s Coalition on Immigration over a “sense of disbelief” that her government facilitated the importation of sexual predators into Ireland, endangering the native women and girls of the nation.
The coalition was launched in conjunction with a 20-page report entitled “Through a Safeguarding lens, darkly: a thematic report into the International Protection Provision in Ireland,” which compared official crime statistics and government data from six European nations; Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.
According to the report, foreign nationals “are on average three to four times more likely to be represented” in sexual offences. However, it went on to note that this rose “exponentially” among certain ethnic groups. In Italy, the report claimed, Afghan and Pakistani migrants were 15 times more involved in rapes than Italian citizens.
“The Government has yet to officially link immigration to an increase in crime and or indeed to sexual violence. In fact, there would appear to be a policy of downplaying this link evident in parliamentary debate and media reporting. However, the data doesn’t lie,” De Brún said.
“Factual analysis must trump political correctness lest public trust in our institutions be eroded,” she added, pointing to the recent government-commissioned Casey Report in Britain into the predominantly Pakistani Muslim child rape grooming gangs, which found that fear of appearing racist or of stoking ethnic tensions facilitated the mass sexual exploitation of thousands of mostly young white working class girls across England.
The issue of public safety in regards to mass migration was brought to the fore of Irish politics in October after a 10-year-old girl was allegedly raped by an African migrant. At the time of the alleged attack, the young girl was under the protection of the state and the migrant was being housed in a hotel at taxpayer expense.
As in Ireland, concerned women have increasingly taken centre stage in Britain against mass migration. Indeed, following a similar sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by an Ethiopian hotel migrant over the summer, a group called the “Pink Ladies” emerged as one of the leading protest movements in the country.
De Brún said that a chief aim of the Women’s Coalition on Immigration will be to pressure the government to release full statistics on sexual offences in Ireland by country of origin and ethnicity so that “policy can be formulated on fact, not on wishful thinking or ideology.”
“The data from Europe is a stark warning that the safety of women and children is risked by current immigration policy specifically by the placing of international protection applicants in residential areas because these men are not screened via European crime databases,” she said.
The co-author of the report, journalist Barbara McCarthy, said: “This report breaks new ground by confronting the changing patterns of sexual crime in Europe from stranger assaults to group-based offending – and by insisting that Ireland can no longer operate without disaggregated, transparent data. We cannot respond effectively to evolving risks if we refuse to measure them honestly.”
“Across Europe, the nature of sexual violence is shifting: alongside traditional patterns of offending, we are now seeing a marked rise in opportunistic street attacks and group-based assaults, often involving multiple perpetrators acting together in public spaces.”