Historian reveals STI epidemic in ’30s Ireland

IRELAND of the 1930s is often viewed as being chaste and straitlaced, with old Pathe newsreel images of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress dominating perceptions of the era.

However, historian Padraig Yeates has discovered that the country, far from being virtuous, was in fact in the grip of a deadly syphilis epidemic centred almost exclusively around Dublin.

The historian also discovered that more women were convicted for being drunken and disorderly than men, lending some truth to the old saying that when it came to drink “the women were worse than the men”.