No Sleaze in Our Area!

Big shout out to Vera Brady, who stood 'shivering in the cold outside Stringfellows' at its grand opening last night, waving placards and forecasting doom.

"This used to be a safe place", she roared, "Now I'll be living next door to a strip club. Men coming out of there will be all hyped up. How do we know if women will be safe?"

1. Parnell Street is, and probably always be, a shithole. It is one of the least appealing areas of Dublin, notable only for the UGC cinema - I'll be cold in my grave before I acknowledge it as 'cineworld' - and the delicious pork sausages sold in Aldi, a top-end foot retail outlet...Stringfellows is not even making a bad situation worse. It couldn't possibly have gotten any worse than it already was.

2. The terrifying image of testosterone-fuelled alpha males tumbling out on the streets after a lap-dance and ravaging the local squaws because they want the real thing is frankly laughable. This doesn't happen outside Lapellos on Dame Street, which, incidentally, is a far more scurrilous establishment, so why should it happen outside Stringfellows?

I can't bring myself to believe that Vera Brady is actually a real person. But the above quotation, and the one that follows, is from the Irish Times and is part of a report by Carl O'Brien, an eminently serious journalist who usually covers the Childrens' Court. As a parting shot, our crusading hero blamed "the dancing laws that go back to 1935...That was for Irish dancing. There's none of that going on in here".

You couldn't make it up. I passed Stringfellows last night on my way to the Cobblestone for a trad session. Vera Brady was not alone. These people have far, FAR too much time on their hands.

And it wasn't cold enough to cause a person to shiver. It was, in fact, quite mild!

I should point out that I'm no great advocate of strip clubs, I simply don't think their particulary harmful, especially ones like Stringfellows, which maintain a high media profile and are, as such, more accountable than places like Lapellos. The behaviour of some club owners towards their staff is deplorable and wrong. But I fear this was not the motive behind the protests last night. It was the frenzied braying of conservative yahoos, the natural successors to the honorable citizens who assaulted pro-choice campaigners in 1983 and were the architects of a moral climate that saw children born out of wedlock legally recognized as second class citizens until the 1970s. And I have no time for them.