‘If the council had listened to me, this paedophile would have been stopped’https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/5b4f85c7f4c4826fWhen Marion Harding contacted the chief executive of Surrey County Council in 2021 to raise safeguarding concerns about her local Pride organisation, she expected a speedy response.
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Harding, 62, and her wife, Cathy, 59, had volunteered for Pride in Surrey, but both had a number of worries about Ireland’s conduct, not least that he had appointed himself head of safeguarding – a role that, according to guidance for voluntary bodies, should “not be the most senior person in the organisation”.
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Harding wrote to Joanna Killian, the chief executive of Surrey County Council, outlining some of her concerns, including that Ireland was in a relationship with a young man “who is barely 18”, in what amounted to an “abuse of power from a person in a position of trust, and could cause the wrong message to go out to young, vulnerable gay people”.
In an email to Harding on Oct 19 2021, Killian said: “With your permission, I would like to raise these concerns directly with Pride in Surrey CIC’s management. Although we cannot investigate these matters directly as Pride is an independent organisation, we take seriously the concerns raised about the event we sponsored and the organisation itself – the latter of which we would normally wish to engage with again on similar events in future.
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“I’ve gone through a whole gamut of emotions from anger to frustration as to why did nobody listen?” says Harding, who lives with Cathy in Guildford. “Because maybe if they had, there wouldn’t have been so many people harmed by this man and David Sutton.
“They [Surrey County Council] said they would investigate and report back, but it went silent. And after a while I stopped chasing, because I didn’t need to be reminded of what this man was.
“Last summer, when I heard about his arrest and what he’d done, it made me sick to my stomach to think what these poor kids had gone through. If we had been listened to, there was a very high chance it would not have happened.”
One aspect of some/many "Pride" events in the US is that local NAMBLA-affiliated groups are full participants. This crime happened in the UK, but chances are there are "Pride" orgs - probably not all, obviously - in the US used by pedophiles to smokescreen their grooming and assault activities.
