***update on northern ireland legislation***

[thehighwayman]

Lets fill our boots up North before June 1st!

[liffey]

Oh, and I also forgot to mention...

If you link a bank account to a PayPal account, the names on the accounts have to match.

So anyone making a payment to you gets to see your real name. They've thought of everything.

[oscarmilde]

any ideas of what penalties will be imposed?

[bollocks]

Lets fill our boots up North before June 1st!

Always had great respect for the highwayman.......so now he is a community moderator...What is that?

I live in the community

Does that help?

[Empirical]

Kate, in a reasonable world you'd be right. And in a reasonable world busybodies wouldn't be trying to interfere in what happens between consenting adults in private

Unfortunately "payment" in Irish law covers anything you can think of.

The definition of "sexual services" will probably be as wide as possible, certainly at the beginning unless the Attorney General steps in to narrow it. I don't expect her to be minded to do so, they'll probably leave it to the courts. The government will certainly aim for it to include "massage" and BDSM, so basically it'll be whatever the judge says it is until proven otherwise.

The PayPal approach has some problems:

First, in Ireland there are only two ways to get money out of a PayPal account, either a) send it to someone else which is of limited use or b) transfer it to a bank account. You can only link a PayPal account to one bank account at a time, and thanks to our wonderful anti-money-laundering law that links back to your real name and address.

Second, Paypal (being run by American Prudes and under pressure from the US DoJ) will not deal with anything related to "sexual services". It's in their T&Cs. If they get so much as a hint that the account holder is doing anything remotely sexy, for example by their own monitoring or a tip-off email or anonymous phone call, they will suspend the account immediately. It is practically impossible to get the account unfrozen. Any money in the account will be lost, you'll never see it again. The bank account can also be frozen in some circumstances.

Third, any other email addresses linked to that account will also come under suspicion and any linked accounts are likely to be frozen as well.

Fourth, you can't set up a business PayPal account without a VAT number, and anything remotely like massage or coaching will sooner or later get the account frozen "temporarily" while they "review" it and make you send in copies of training certificates etc.

Trust me, you really really don't want to go down the PayPal route.

FWIW, the same things also seem to apply to Visa and MasterCard. They don't like anything to do with sex.

[liffey]

The Department of Justice in the US has armtwisted most, if not all, of the US base internet giants into the same attitude. Craigslist was only the first, Yahoo, Google, Tumblr, Instagram, Kickstarter, all the payment systems. Sex (especially anything kinky or non cis/het) is slowly being made to disappear from the internet, and the ultimate aim is censorship of anything the prudes and moralists dislike.

It's all being done behind closed doors. I read a great article on the project a month or two ago. It's got a code name and everything. I can't find the damn thing now.


<sarcasm>Oh, well, look on the bright side. At least I'm not L, G, B, T, I or Q, no-one's trying to kill me or cure me. They're happy enough to see me living in celibacy & misery.</sarcasm>

[Empirical]

What, I wonder, will the effect of this new anti-sex law be on supply and on costs. Will new entrants find it hard going before they get established, will they vote with their feet and not come? And will the costs remain the same, rise or fall?

As above, I guess things could go very quiet in the smaller towns; staying anonymous out in the sticks is far harder than in a big city; and in the sticks, the moralising can be fearsome.

I don't have much sympathy with the landlords who seem to rent flats at quite exorbitant rates.

[emilyuk]

I'll be staying in Belfast and I won't be changing my rates, I will be doing everything possible to protect myself and my darling clients. Removal of face pictures will be my first approach unfortunately.

Keep safe everyone let's not let them ruin all our fun xxx

[Empirical]

Emily, I was just wondering how providers would react, I don't have an agenda.

Yet I can see that things might well be difficult in the future.

They are certainly trying to ruin fun; avoiding them might be difficult :-(

[oscarmilde]

Will Ireland be turned into a police state so government can get their hands on a used condom? we can only wait n see