If you noticed the GAA’s Gamechanger campaign at all you may well have assumed that the organisation had chosen to invest some of their considerable income — €132.9 million in 2024 — in Domestic, Sexual and Gender-based Violence (DSGBV) awareness campaigns. Someone more cynical might assume that this was a neat piece of PR for the GAA given its male-oriented focus and machismo.
If you looked deeper on the Gamechanger website you may have felt that Ruhama, which is classed as one of the “Support services”, were a rather strange choice of partner for the GAA’s campaign you’d be correct. Gamechanger’s mission is to use
the positive influence of Gaelic Games to tackle one of the most serious issues facing our society today – Domestic, Sexual and Gender-based Violence. Game Changer seeks to provide everyone with the tools and knowledge they need to challenge harmful attitudes, norms and behaviours.
This is at odds with Ruhama’s claim to offer “free and confidential support to women impacted by prostitution and victims of human trafficking at any time in their lives”. Ruhuma was itself founded by members of the Good Shepherd Sisters and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, which readers will remember ran the Magdalene Laundries. But it gets stranger. Gamechanger is funded by €1m in DSGBV-specific funding allocated to Ruhama which itself came from the new government DSGBV agency, Cuan.
Accounting for funding
To put this into context, only €3,574,000 in total, was allocated in budget 2025 “to promote and assist the development of support services to victims of crime. This funding enables the provision of services supporting victims at different stages of the criminal justice system”. Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan has is relatively cagy about the specifics of DSGBV funding awards. But under the previous Justice Minster Helen McEntee , who approved the Gamechanger allocation, Ruhama invariably got the lion’s share, even over struggling emergency shelters and rape crisis services.
Take the following examples:
• Minister McEntee announces substantially increased funding for organisations supporting victims of crime, with the highest award of €705,217 being made to Ruhama with the next highest award less than half of that – March 2022
• Acting Minister Harris announces €5.25m in funding for organisations supporting victims of crime. The highest award of €740,000 was made to Ruhama, the next highest award was €370,000 and made to Women’s Aid where the CEO had moved from Ruhama in 2019 – January 2023
• Minister McEntee announces €7.7m in funding for organisations supporting victims of crime. The highest award of €1,193,119 was made to Ruhama directly, the next highest, €849,155, was made to Dublin Rape Crisis Centre via Cuan and the next highest made directly was €383,755 to Victim Support at Court – January 2024
Cuan, the new state agency for DSGBV, had seven board members appointed in April 2024. Amongst them was Sarah Benson, former CEO of Ruhama. Another addition was Denise Charlton, a long-time ally of Benson’s and herself a campaign leader for the Turn Off the Red Light and CEO of Community Foundation. Interestingly, both are listed as GameChanger funding partners and do seem to have provided some additional funding.
Ten years ago all of the above might have seemed questionable and even been investigated in the mainstream press. But in 2025 it doesn’t seem to have anything like the same impact, even on me. Then, on 1 October the US State Department finally released the 2025 Trafficking in Persons report that people were doubting would ever see the light of day under the current administration.
Of particular note in the report is:
• “The government reported providing at least €2.21 million to NGOs for victim assistance, cultural mediators for victim support, legal services, training, and awareness-raising activities, an increase compared with €1.77 million in 2023”.
• “In September 2024, the government adopted the Criminal Law (Sexual Offenses and Human Trafficking) Act 2024, which introduced statutory framework for a revised NRM [National Referral Mechanism] to identify and support trafficking victims. The government allotted a €1 million budget for NRM implementation”.
• “The government continued to implement its 2023-2027 NAP for sex and labor trafficking, with specific measures for children, which included a defined implementation timeframe, a €700,000 dedicated budget, and plans for a monitoring committee and outside evaluation”.
By 29 August 2024 €1million had been allocated to GameChanger.
The fiscal truth
Even by 2025 standards something is badly wrong with the priorities here. It did occur to me that so much money, for what amounts to sports-related PR, may have been allocated and just proved impossible to refuse. Not so. It turns out records show that Ruhama lobbied for this specific funding on 20 September 2023 and again on 19 January 2024.
Ruhama’s 2024 accounts reveal that they spent €274,258 on GameChanger but only €71,799 on Service Users, which was slightly less than the €77,806 they spent in 2023. But this was still far more than the €47,280 they spent in 2022.
Ruhama’s service users sell sex for many reasons, sometimes to cope with crushing poverty or an unprecedented crisis. To quote Ruth Breslin of The Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy Institute (SERP) addressing the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) earlier this year:
Women spoke hugely about the pressure of family obligations. These were migrant women with children often left in their home country who needed support who needed to be educated, fed, clothed and all of that, and women’s driving motivation was to earn money in order to support their families. But some were also supporting parents. Some were supporting siblings to go to university. Some of them reporting were supporting the cancer treatment of their parents who were dying in their country of origin. And the women spoke about how heavily these family obligations weighed upon them. And it was something that was keeping a lot of women who wanted to leave prostitution because the majority of our sample did, but these obligations were keeping them there.
Breslin has been an ally and associate of Ruhama for a very long time and worked for them between June 2014 and January 2019. SERP was originally founded by Denise Charlton in 2017. Community Foundation provides much of its funding and Ruhama provides much of their data on people who sell sex as well as the very few they have interviewed. Considering this, Ruhama cannot claim to be unaware of those driven by the desperate circumstances Breslin describes.
It would probably take less than €10,000 to get most of the people selling sex in similar crises out for good. Nothing has ever prevented Ruhama from lobbying for €1m in funding for their service users. But it doesn’t want it that way.
One would hope all of the above should be sufficient to require a full investigation into funding allocations made by the the Department of Justice to Ruhama and former Turn Off the Red Light allies.
Once upon a time Gaye Dalton sold sex to survive. It gets REALLY complicated after that.
Featured image via Gamechanger.ie – Screenshot
