Sex for sale: What lies behind the rise in pop-up brothels across Cork City?
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A woman in a leopard-print fleece dressing gown and fluffy slippers smoked a cigarette in the early afternoon sun outside a short-term rental on a quiet Cork street, dark hair tied back in a perfunctory ponytail.
Black plastic bin bags were taped across the ground-floor windows of the building, recently renovated and leased as a short-term rental.
Cigarette butts quickly accumulated on the pavement outside as men smoked while waiting for appointments, many well-dressed, professional-looking in their 30s and 40s, some glancing nervously at their phone for a distraction or to double check the location.
Neighbours complained about the pop-up brothel and the woman moved on. But just days later. a similar, but marginally more discreet, enterprise moved in.
Some streets in Cork have now become notorious for pop-up brothels, with a stream of men seen entering and exiting certain buildings every 15 minutes.
And the ready availability of Airbnbs and other short-term lets are facilitating a spike in prostitution across Cork City, Garda sources say.
“Use of Airbnb has facilitated an increase in sexual services,” a garda said.
“A lot of letters come into the Garda stations from anonymous residents giving information about addresses near them being used for prostitution. A lot of our information would come from residents, saying ‘this place is being used’.”
The Garda source has seen a major increase in prostitution over the last 12 months to two years.
“I don’t remember getting phone calls or letters about brothels four or five years ago.
Airbnb said it has had no complaints or contact from gardaí in Cork about properties on its platform being used for prostitution.
The company would take any such complaint very seriously and co-operate fully with law enforcement, a company spokesperson said.
Airbnb can be used as a catch-all phrase for all short-term rentals, the company said.
Women working in the sex trade told the they have used Airbnbs and short-term rental apartments to sell sex.
A Garda source said some properties were being consistently sublet to different women to sell sex in, often by organised crime. Some criminal prosecutions of this activity are ongoing.
But others are short-term rentals, sourced through sites like Airbnb, the source said.
“A lot of the properties that we’ve gone to, we found have been genuinely rented out as Airbnbs. The owners did not know.
“They just leave the keys out, it was booked through AirBnB.
“The majority of hotels around here [Cork city] are also being used. Many girls share a hotel room.
“A lot of girls come for a few weeks, they go to different cities and towns — Cork, Waterford, Tralee. Then they go back to the Czech Republic, Romania.
“A lot of girls seem to come over in twos and threes, from Poland, Romania. You never see them on their own. It’s a safety prerogative.
“Trafficking is in the back of your mind for all these searches [of premises where sex is allegedly sold]. Is this linked to organised crime and are these girls being coerced?
“And who is managing/organising? They are making serious money.
“You’re also concerned for the safety of the girls. Society might say it’s consensual but you don’t know if they’re forced to be there.”
The Garda Protective Services Unit investigates reports of sexual services for sale and monitors and investigates sexual offences.
“The Protective Services Unit will always act on the information they get,” a Garda source said.
“But operations are time-consuming. You need surveillance on a property before going to a judge for a search warrant. It’s exhaustive for guards and very time-consuming.
“The PSU has carried out a lot of searches in the last few months. A number of customers were stopped entering or exiting premises.”
Although selling sex as an individual is not a crime, buying sex is under Irish law.
When caught by gardaí, a file on the incident is sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who decides whether there are sufficient grounds to charge the accused with knowingly buying sex. If the DPP decides to charge, that person is brought before the courts.
Women who work together can be charged with brothel-keeping, which is a criminal offence.
But a Garda source said a successful charge and conviction requires a lot of proof, like transcripts to prove services and sales, record-keeping, notebooks, phones and probably an admission from the people involved, who can then leave the jurisdiction.
And as women tend to move or be moved around the country selling sex, gardaí do not have the resources to monitor all of the sex trade, they said.
Some 60 prostitution offences were recorded in 2022 and 18 human-trafficking offences, according to Central Statistics Office data.
In the second three months of this year, there were 21 recorded incidents of prostitution offences and five of human trafficking. In the first three months of this year, there were 15 recorded incidents of prostitution-related offences and five of human trafficking.
But anecdotal evidence suggests these crimes are far more prevalent than that data suggests.
The rising cost of living since the war in Ukraine seems to be pushing more women into the sex trade, a Garda source said.
“One woman admitted that her child was at home in Hungary with her parents. Her parents thought she was in Ireland working legitimately, But she was moving around Ireland selling sex because she saw the opportunity to work.
“Rates seem to be €80-€100 for half an hour and €200-€250 for one hour on average.
“You see it on the southside and the northside of the city. On the South Mall, the North Mall, MacCurtain Street, Blackpool, Barrack Street because there are so many houses and apartments for short-term rent there. They can choose locations close to the city centre to be close to customers, to night clubs and pubs.”
"The internet has brought the sex trade off the streets and behind closed doors. People can now book someone to buy sex from online and go to their location.
“Up to about six or seven years ago, you’d still see it on the streets, by the South Mall or the docks in Cork. You’d see about 20 women lining the street in parts of Stoneybatter in Dublin. But it’s all moved inside now with the internet,” a Garda source said.
Gardaí recently responded to reports of a pop-up brothel in Cork City where they found a woman in her 60s selling sex to a man in his 20s.
Although many women gardaí have encountered on calls in Cork City have been in their mid to late 20s, about 30% have been women aged over 45, a Garda source said.
“Legislation [criminalising the buyer and organising prostitution] is some deterrent but it’s not stopping it because it’s still huge,” they said.
Ruth Breslin of UCD’s Sexual Exploitation Research Programme (Serp) said Airbnbs could facilitate the way the sex trade works.
Women frequently move or are moved around the country to different towns and cities in response to sex buyers’ desire for “new faces”, she said.
“It’s a very mobile trade. It’s a very demand-led market. New girls, or what they call ‘new faces’, are very important to buyers. Sex buyers seem to like variety so they’re keen on the new girl in town and they’ll keep an eye on escort sites to see who is new in their area.”
The majority of women in the sex trade are migrant women, Ms Breslin said.
A 2021 report by Serp and the HSE’s Women’s Health Service found 94% of women surveyed were migrants: 37.5% were Brazilian, 31.9% were Romanian, 6.3% were Irish , 3.5% were Hungarian and 2% were Bolivian.
In recent days, on Ireland’s main prostitution website, 18 out of 864 profiles advertised themselves as "Irish".
“I’ve interviewed women who don’t have a fixed address in Ireland. They essentially move from location to location that are used as brothels.
“They might be five days in Dublin, then Cork, Limerick, Galway, maybe up to Donegal or Belfast and back down again.
“That’s to satisfy the demand of buyers for ‘new girls.’ Because its organised, you might see three women leaving an apartment on Wednesday but then quickly replaced by another three women.
“To facilitate that organisation you can see how Airbnbs would be useful, because that’s something you can book relatively last-minute. And it is discreet, you don’t have to walk through a hotel lobby.”
Ms Breslin has seen a marked recent increase in advertised sex work online.
“When you looked at the sites over the last few years you would always see about 650 different profiles on the site every day, so that’s about 650 people advertising for the purposes of prostitution.
“Today, there are 864. Over the last year, there has probably been an increase of around 100 people advertising daily.
“All the women on there are made to look totally independent, yet I’ve met women on there who do not manage their ads at all, it’s an organiser that puts their ads up. I also met women who did not know their profile was on that website but that’s where their trafficker or their pimp put them.”
The cost-of-living crisis is likely driving more women into sex work, she said.
“We can speculate that we are in really difficult economic times. We’re post-covid, in a cost-of-living crisis, and especially for migrant women, they might have worked in the more informal or grey economy in their countries of origin and many of those small, informal businesses collapsed during covid.
“These women are probably facing quite severe poverty at home and have family relying on them.
“That’s so much of what we see in the profile of women in the trade. They are migrant women and they’re there because they’ve been directly coerced or they’ve been pushed in by poverty. They’re trying to escape poverty, come to Ireland and send a lot of the money they make home to families that are relying on them.
“A lot of the women there are desperate for the money. So some of the increase may be that more women have been driven into it financially.” Sex work appears to be on a spectrum, Ms Breslin said.
Research shows that some 10%-24% of women have been trafficked into it. Another 5%-10% are women who chose to enter into sex work as a job, a way to make a living.
“And then in the middle you have about 80% who are just very vulnerable women. They will not fit the classic definition of being trafficked but there can often be a coercive person like a boyfriend or they are just economically vulnerable and desperate. They’re doing it, prostitution, as a way to survive. They’re doing it out of lack of other choices.
“At one extreme end there is a woman locked in a room, at the other extreme end there is the women saying ‘everything is fine’ and then there is this big chunk of women in the middle who are just in very desperate circumstances.
“So it’s a very vulnerable cohort. And because of the level of violence and organised crime involved, it’s a very, very dangerous place to be.
“Those working for themselves are the lucky few.
“Women probably have to earn between €800-€1,000 per week to cover expenses. They could pay €750 for rent, €150 for the escort website. Some are paying up to €1,000 per month to advertise — every time they update an ad they pay, they pay to appear at the top of searches. They pay to have an ‘available now’ ad flashing.
“One women told me that ‘the real pimps here are [the website]’. She was paying €1,000 per month.
“Airbnb owners probably don’t know that their property is being used for this. But anything that facilitates short term lets will facilitate the trade.
"Airbnb don’t want their name or brand anywhere near this. Maybe more needs to be done around safety or checks — like monitoring bulk booking.”