by Bernie English
A DECISION to allow a man who made significant amounts of money from running brothels in Limerick to walk free from court has been slammed by Limerick’s migrant representative body.
Doras Luimní said that they consider the suspended sentence of Dublin man Thomas Lyons, who profited from prostitution in Limerick, to be “highly disappointing”.
Mr Lyons previously worked as a senior consultant with a transport group in Dublin and served as a Government consultant on a number of projects.
He admitted charges of running and profiting from brothels in Limerick city between 2010 and 2011 where women from Romania, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Niger and Hungary worked in various locations around the city, according to Doras Luimni.
Judge Tom O’Donnell commended the Gardaí for their two year investigation into the case and imposed a four year suspended sentence on Mr Lyons with six years on probation.
In a statement to the Limerick Post, Doras Luimni said: “We would like to commend Limerick Gardaí for this and earlier operations, such as Operation Freewheel in 2011. As we have stated repeatedly, women in the sex industry should not be the focus of criminalisation.
“Prostitution in Limerick is highly organised. It is extremely lucrative. We also think it important to highlight that prostitution in Limerick, as elsewhere, is highly racialised and gendered – migrant women mainly from Eastern Europe make up 90 per cent of those available for commercial sexual services in the city, as is particularly evident in this investigation.
“Therefore it is disappointing that Mr Lyons gets to walk free from the court with a suspended sentence”.
The statement added that Doras Luimini believes that those who organise and profit from prostitution,” the pimps and traffickers, should be the target of Garda investigations.
“We also believe that those same individuals should bear the full brunt of the law. Considering the amount of time and resources needed to prosecute Mr Lyons, and considering the gravity of the offences, it is disappointing that he did not receive a custodial sentence. It sends a message that those who organise and profit from prostitution will be treated leniently by the criminal justice system
“We believe that someone who seriously profits from prostitution should receive a sentence commensurate with the severity of the crime”, the statement concluded.
