One hundred years ago this month, those intent on purifying Dublin orchestrated a clampdown on the city’s red-light district. The previous year, a vocal commentator on sexual immorality, the Jesuit priest Richard S Devane, had suggested that as long as the British army garrison was in Dublin, “it was impossible to deal with prostitution effectively. Now a new order has opened up, and things can be done with comparative ease.”
The targeting of the “Monto” region of the city – Montgomery Street was subsequently renamed Foley Street – was part of a wider crusade against perceived hedonism and involved expansive definitions of transgression that were to have lasting consequences. The establishment of an interdepartmental committee of inquiry on venereal disease was another indication of this, as was a growing preoccupation with unmarried mothers and licensing law reform to target excessive drinking. The solidifying of this ethos was very much about, in the words of historian Maria Luddy, “imposing, particularly on women, standards of idealised conduct that would return the nation to purity”.
In 1925 the commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police suggested that, until that year, the Monto brothels operated without “much let or hindrance on the part of the police authorities”, and he insisted the law as it stood “respects too much the liberty of the subject”. It was the Legion of Mary, established by civil servant Frank Duff in 1921, rather than state or police, that had initially done most to clamp down on prostitution in the Monto in the mid 1920s. Duff contended “it is not too much to say that one half of the largest parish in the city, numbering 60,000 persons was, more or less, corrupted by the spectacle of open vice, and to a large extent, too, drawn into the whirl of it”.
Some brothel owners were cajoled into shutting down their premises voluntarily, but it was the agreement of the gardaí to force the recalcitrant that led to a raid in March 1925, during which more than 100 people were arrested. After that it was believed the problem of the “open brothel” no longer existed. Duff estimated there were 200 women working in the Monto in 1922, and that by 1925 this was reduced to 40.
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Sentimentality, or a “rare auld times” narrative, is unwarranted in looking at this history of prostitution. Former residents of the area who spoke to the North Inner City Folklore Group in the late 20th century recalled bouncers or pimps who were labelled “whore’s bullies”, and there was a belief that “the guards couldn’t do anything”. There were also female pimps, or “madams” who ran the “kip” houses. The prostitutes themselves were not necessarily ostracised by the tenement communities; there was more ire directed at those controlling and exploiting them and who, in the words of one contemporary, “gave them a terrible scourging life”.
That theme remains sadly relevant. One of the dominant urges of the mid 1920s was to keep Ireland free of the perceived tide of foreign immorality, or as the Christian Brothers put it then, the need to ban the “gilded filth” from outside Ireland. But a century on, what is striking is the degree to which prostitution and sexual exploitation in Ireland are now so associated with global networks and human trafficking. Earlier this month a man was jailed for 4½ years for his role in the human trafficking of three women from Nigeria who were later forced into prostitution in Ireland by “third parties”. In tandem, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has observed that the proliferation of extreme, violent pornography, easily accessible on the internet, is reflected in the nature of the some of the rapes reported to gardaí in recent years, and that this was especially a feature in attacks on women who work in prostitution.
In 2022 a collaborative study between the National Women’s Council and UCD’s Sexual Exploitation Research Programme (SERP) noted: “In Ireland, the profile of women in the sex trade (estimated to be 1,000 women at any one time) is of young, vulnerable migrants from the Global South and impoverished regions of central and eastern Europe.” The 2023 report of the support organisation Ruhama highlighted a 30 per cent increase on 2022 in the number of women impacted by prostitution and human trafficking for sexual exploitation; 155 victims of human trafficking engaged with Ruhama in 2023. The highest number were from Nigeria (82), Zimbabwe (16) and South Africa (13).
The contentions about Irish purity were always bogus, but our 21st-century “new order”, amid the expected publication of a long delayed review of sex-work legislation and much focus on toxic masculinity, is alarming. Traditional street prostitution has been replaced by sordid networks, run by pimps often using short-term rented premises, while we read regularly of shocking levels of gender-based violence, a century after the Monto was deemed disgraceful.
