The Irish Council of Churches (ICC) held its 92nd Annual Meeting on Thursday 26th March. As an outworking of the ICC’s commitment to enabling Churches to understand each other, work together and connect in Christ, the Meeting took place in a Salvation Army church. On a day which brought together over 100 delegates from leadership, senior clergy and lay people from across the island of Ireland, Major Anne Read, Anti–trafficking Response Coordinator for the Salvation Army, gave a keynote address focussing attention on the challenge of modern–day slavery – human trafficking. 

Major Read spoke powerfully about the ‘dehumanisation of people today across the world and in our own communities in the UK and Ireland’. She reminded delegates that human–trafficking involves ‘tricking vulnerable people across borders and within countries through physical and verbal threat, sexual and labour exploitation and domestic servitude’ and the numbers are constantly growing. 

She encouraged Churches and partner organisations across society to reach out to victims on the margins in order to eliminate this offensive commodification of people. She said that ‘God’s big plan is the restoration of humankind into His image and likeness so that all may be fully human people of God.’ 

On the day that the Modern Slavery Bill became law in the United Kingdom, Major Read called for an audacious ambition: simply ‘Stop the Traffic’. 

Major Read’s keynote was supplemented by dialogues on the social outreach of the Salvation Army, including Homelessness, Dementia, Care for the Elderly and Specialist Family Care. 

At the close of the Meeting, ICC President Rev Dr Donald Watts stated that Major Read, in her remarks, took us to some of the darkest, deepest and most upsetting areas of human life. However, he also noted but that she and the other Salvation Army centres we had seen throughout the day presented to us in such a way that delegates would leave with a great deal of hope as we enter into Easter week.