The sickening, horrifying and deeply disturbing details of the gang-rape, mutilation and torture of teenage girls, some as young as 11 and 12, by mostly Pakistani men in cities across Britain continue to emerge – as does the detail of the inexplicable actions of the authorities who facilitated this mass rape and depravity by their ineptitude, their disgusting prejudice regarding working-class girls, and their revolting cowardice.
A question that is not being fully examined in regard to our own jurisdiction is whether the same horrors are being inflicted on children in care in Ireland by predators who also seem to be operating with impunity.
It is now abundantly clear that a fear of being thought of as racist, or of inflating racial tensions, led to silence, cover-up, and sometimes even actions that assisted the evil monsters in these rape gangs which operated – and still operate, according to some experts – in up to 50 towns and cities across Britain, including Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, Oldham, Oxford, Bradford and many more.
Until recently, with some notable and brave exceptions, media coverage was patchy and thin, lacking the detail necessary to ensure a full public understanding of the scale of the abuse – and politicians and commentators accused those trying to raise the issue, and the pattern of mostly Pakistani men raping white girls, as racist.
Some of the depraved abuse that was perpetrated on those young girls – children really – is almost too disturbing to read: the extreme violence of the gang rapes, the racism towards white girls in the mutilation, torture, beatings, murder, and further horrors. According to the Jay Inquiry into Rotherham, some fathers who desperately sought to rescue their daughters were arrested by police.
Andrew Norfolk, chief investigative reporter for The Times, conducted a four year investigation into “the lost girls of Rotherham” and tells how one girl went missing just after her 13th birthday. “Don’t worry love, she’ll turn up”, police said. She didn’t, but at 2.30 the following morning, a woman who heard a young girl screaming in a house next door called the police .
“Police had gone around to the house, they found this 13-year-old girl with another young girl, she was almost completely naked, she was blind drunk, and she was with 7 adult Pakistani men. She was drunk and leery. Police arrested the 13 yo girl for being drunk and disorderly.”
The girl – the 13 year old child – was charged and convicted of being drunk and disorderly. The men weren’t even questioned. Norfolk also tells of another child who was the only resident of a children’s home in Rotherham who repeatedly went missing for periods of up to a fortnight. She was put “blind drunk” into a bedroom in a house and cars began arriving from all over Greater Manchester to rape that child.
This overview by the Telegraph recounts that: “In Telford, Lucy Lowe died at 16 alongside her mother and sister when her abuser set fire to her home in 2000. She had given birth to Azhar Ali Mahmood’s child when she was just 14, and was pregnant when she was killed.”
In Telford, an independent review finally published in 2022 found, “witnesses set out multiple allegations of police corruption and favouritism towards the Pakistani community. Regardless of the reason, the inquiry found that “there was a nervousness about race… bordering on a reluctance to investigate crimes committed by what was described as the ‘Asian’ community”.”
THE IRISH REPORT FROM 2023
Now that the British government is being forced to face up to its extraordinary failings, we need to demand answers from the mostly seemingly disinterested authorities here in our own country who were warned by experts 18 months ago in a report from UCD entitled Protecting Against Predators: A Scoping Study on the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Young People in Ireland, that predatory gangs were operating in Ireland too.
In June 2023, Maria Maynes reported on this platform that:
Vulnerable children in care in Ireland are clearly being targeted for sexual exploitation and abuse by “gangs of predatory men,” a stark new report from UCD has revealed.
It reported numerous cases where girls in the care of TUSLA, the State’s child and family agency, were “being coerced or enticed to provide sex acts to multiple men in exchange for a variety of goods” including clothes and jewellery.
Predatory gangs of men would identify residents where girls in care are being accommodated — and would wait around accommodation centres, even going so far as to wait in hotel lobbies where under-age girls were staying.
In one shocking revelation, the study revealed that men were “hanging around hotel lobbies” in order to sexually exploit children that were being accommodated there as a temporary State care solution.
The report expressed fears that sexual exploitation of children is going “under the radar” in Ireland, while drawing parallels with child sex abuse that went on in Rotherham and Rochdale in the UK – which was characterised by a failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse that took place from the 1980s until the late 2010s.
That report was published at a time when the entire country seemed transfixed by revelations about RTÉ, Ryan Tubridy and back handers, but as I wrote at the time compared to the rape of children by gangs of predators, those scandals seem like a sideshow.
Yet what has been done to address this profoundly disturbing situation in the past 18 months? Very little it seems.
At the time I asked, why had the Justice Minister – and the Minister for Children – not made this a top priority? I also pointed out that TUSLA knows that this rape of children in care is happening and is acting as if it is powerless to stop it.
As I said in June 2023, the report gave an insight into just how terrifying the situation is – and how brazen the predators are in the face of a weak, supine, ineffective state.
When accommodation is not available for children in care, they are brought to stay in hotels as a temporary measure. That leads to men “hanging around hotel lobbies to sexually exploit children that they knew were being accommodated there as a temporary State care solution,” the report says.
Hanging around hotel lobbies? Why didn’t the Gardai arrest them? Why the helplessness in the face of organised sexual exploitation of children?
The children were “being taxied” to other hotels by the predators, sometimes to be given drugs and then raped by gangs of men.
One interviewee for the report says: “[I]n the last couple of years we’ve had some really dreadful cases of young people who were … on a daily basis leaving the [residential] unit late in the evening and coming back early the next morning in taxis, sometimes in very poor shape having taken drugs, being picked up at hotels all around the city…. That was a bunch of people—I mean, they’re taxiing these kids all over the city. They’re calling them in the evening. They’re bringing them to hotels and all the rest of it.
” [T]hey [young girls] go to meet their boyfriend in a hotel room and there’s like five other guys there and, you know, they have to do things with those other people.”
I had to read that twice to take it in. Underage girls out all night and coming back ‘in very poor shape’ having being raped or sexually assaulted and given drugs. Would we let this happen to our daughters? Wouldn’t any parent be straight onto the Gardaí?
Whatever the hell Tusla is doing, it is not acting in loco parentis.
One description from the report paints a horrifying scene with inexperienced [social care] staff unable to deal with these gangs of predatory men.
” And they tried absolutely everything trying to keep her safe. Like [name of carer] was saying, there was curfews given to her. She was saying, ‘No, I’m going off there, my boyfriend is coming.’ Well, it ended up like there was a stream of cars outside there practically every night of the week, and worse at weekends. Like it became so bad at one stage that the staff had to lock her in one room and themselves in the office to ring the guards because they were threatening. Like, they were banging on the doors, banging on the windows and absolutely everything to try to get into the place. So it became a real danger and a flashpoint for everybody.”
The system is clearly in disarray, and the predatory men seem to be in charge. Where is the outrage about what’s happening? Where are the ministers proposing bills and making plans to deal with actual crime and abuse and hate.
Some politicians have done their utmost to try to put pressure on the Ministers in charge. Independent Carol Nolan TD discovered in November 2023 – 5 months after the report was issued – that the Department of Children or Tusla had not formally contacted the Department of Justice on the issue.
She described the sexual exploitation by predators of children in care as an “emergency”, and said there is “a desperate and almost unforgiveable lack of urgency being applied to this issue at the inter-departmental level”.
Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, confirmed to Deputy Nolan that her Department has had no contact from either Tusla or the Department of Children on the report, which the Independent TD described as profoundly alarming.
But, and this is almost incredible, by October 2024, Minister Roderic O’Gorman told Nolan that he had STILL not met with the Department of Justice in regard to what was revealed in the report although he had “sought a meeting with the authors of the report shortly after its publication”.
The reason why the establishment of inter-departmental actions matter is because these children in care are being raped. This is a criminal matter, and the predators banging on the doors of supposed safe care centres demanding that their victims be released to them clearly aren’t afraid of social workers.
Aontú leader, Peadar Tóibín, has repeatedly raised the issue of children going missing when in care, including that of a 14-year old girl who was abducted by a criminal gang within minutes of being placed with Tusla, and was found in a brothel a year later.
Almost at the same time as the 2023 Predators report , the Irish Mail on Sunday claimed that TUSLA were “effectively facilitating” the sexual exploitation of three vulnerable children in the toilets of a fast food restaurant.
The paper reported that the abuse was commonly known amongst TUSLA staff, who would “facilitate them going out to buy fake tan and other bits and bobs.” No arrests were made.
AN IRISH ROTHERHAM?
What are we waiting to happen, exactly? For the scale of the rape and torture and abuse of vulnerable teenage girls to reach the level it did in the UK, where no-one really seems to know how many thousands were sexually abused, but if there were 1,400 girls raped in Rotherham and 1,000 in Telford, then the scale is clearly enormous.
Are the gangs preying on girls in Ireland Irish, or are there different nationalities or ethnicities involved? The ‘Protecting Against Predators’ report makes several references to the deeply disturbing abuse of girls by organised gangs in Rotherham and Rochdale in Britain, saying it was difficult not to draw “parallels” with what happened in the UK cities.
Why do most of the media seem uninterested in finding out if we have, in fact, Rotherham-style predatory gangs operating here? Where are the urgent task forces, the politician action, the kind of priority that was given to, say, hate speech/mean tweets by the establishment?
Are the authorities here, as happened in Britain, placing fears of being described as racist above their duty of care to already vulnerable children who often have lived already chaotic lives?
The Telegraph reports that a 2015 review on Rotherham Council found it was clear that Pakistani men were grooming white girls. But the council was “terrified of [the impact on] community cohesion”
As a result of this combination of factors, the council went to great lengths to “cover up information and silence whistle-blowers”. In the words of witnesses, “if you want to keep your job, you keep your head down and your mouth shut”.
This resistance to an obvious truth repeated itself across the country. By 2010, a West Midlands Police report showed that authorities were aware that grooming gangs were approaching children at school gates.
But as the report stated, “the predominant offender profile of Pakistani Muslim males… combined with the predominant victim profile of white females has the potential to cause significant community tensions”. As a result, the report remained unpublished until released in response to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests five years later.
Many of those who took part in rape gangs in Britain were never arrested or convicted. Some who were convicted were never deported. The girls who were being raped sometimes went to the police themselves. They were largely ignored. They were also called “white slags” and “paki shaggers”. They were working-class and poor and some of the police therefore seemed happy to believe the worst about children who were being abused.
Everyone who was complicit in the appalling cover-up, including the many journalists who under-reported the horror, should be put into the stocks.
Can we, for God’s sake, learn from the horrendous mistakes and cowardice of the authorities in Britain and demand that the government take action now? We need to know the full truth about the predatory gangs operating in Ireland. We need to honest in investigating whether the same culture that saw men deciding they had a “right” to rape white girls because of their ethnicity and religion has taken root here.
One of those victims, the incredibly brave and inspirational, Samantha Smith said that she was now “still at university, barely 20”. “The abuse I suffered still plays in my head daily and I can’t get it out. I remember it all, I feel it all, I see it all. I can feel them on my skin.” Lives are destroyed by these monsters, though Samantha has refused to allow them to destroy her.
There will be little point in wringing our hands after the event – after the possible rape and torture of thousands of Irish girls has taken place.