Ireland of pimps and prostitutes belies the ‘comely maidens’ myth
The redoubtable Fianna Fáil TD Mary O’Rourke insisted: “We may not be open about the subject, but it is a question of men paying money to get women and of the debasement of women… the Ireland of which we speak and to which women are being trafficked is no longer the land of comely maidens and youthful swains who are seeking to meet, talk and walk with one another. Rather, it is a land of sleazy brothels where seedy acts are carried out for money.”
The idea that such exploitation is new is nonsense. Prostitution and the exploitation that goes with it are as old as Ireland itself and, historically, there was always a brisk trade as a result of the number of soldiers stationed in the country. The first Magdalen asylum was opened in Dublin in 1766 and by the early years of the last century there were at least 23 such institutions in existence to rescue and reform “fallen women”. In 1850, there were 4,650 arrests for prostitution in the Dublin metropolitan police district.
The “Curragh Wrens” of the 19th century, some of whom lived year-round in the furze bushes which were the only ground cover on the Curragh plain, endured deplorable conditions, but they were there because there was a demand for them from the soldiers, and 500 such women were estimated to be in the locality in 1865. At the same time there were 132 brothels and upwards of 1,000 prostitutes in Dublin city. In some urban areas, prostitution was carried out so openly that the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1903 compared Dublin in this context to southern Europe and Algeria.
Business got slower after the withdrawal of British troops in 1922 and the successful campaign by Frank Duff and the Legion of Mary to shut down the Monto, an extensive brothel and tenement quarter in Montgomery Street in Dublin’s inner city.
Duff, to his credit, sought to be humane, to ensure prostitutes and their children were not separated and to provide them with shelter, training and some chance of a different life. Most of the Monto brothels ceased to operate following extensive police raids in 1925. Duff estimated that there were 200 girls working there in 1922. The number had been reduced to 40 by 1925. Some of those who remained working the streets, however, became victims of the desire to deal with prostitution by hiding the prostitutes and then ignoring them, including those who ended up in the Magdalen laundries where a distinction was made between those “first fallen” and “habitual offenders”. It was telling that prostitutes who were convicted in the courts often expressed a preference to go to Mountjoy for six months rather than a Magdalen laundry where the incarceration could be much longer and, in some cases, indefinite.
There were times, however, when the issue of prostitution could not be hidden, particularly when the women became victims of murderous misogyny. Honour Bright, for example, was killed while working as a prostitute in 1926 and testimony at her trial showed that while the Monto area had gone quiet, business was still brisk outside the Shelbourne Hotel. Accounts of her trial also made it clear that the Dublin poor had a deal of sympathy for the “unfortunate girls” working in their midst.
Pimping also continued throughout the hungry 1940s and ’50s.
At Dublin Circuit Court in 1942, a man was prosecuted for forcing his 19-year-old wife, “not being a common prostitute… to have unlawful carnal connection with other persons”. He was quite frank in his statement about why he did it: “It’s the only way a man can live nowadays… she objected to leading this life, but I did not allow her to discontinue it”.
And so it continued during the mythical era of “comely maidens”. Prostitution continued to be largely ignored, though some observers did attempt to expose the myth that Ireland was a country where purity reigned. The American journalist Francis Hackett, who had spent some time living in Ireland in the 1920s, summed it up succinctly in 1945 when he observed of the Irish that “about the problems of sex they claim to be doves when they are in fact ostriches” and kept quiet until some harrowing act of violence would once again propel the issue into the headlines.
In the 1970s, there were turf wars between English and Irish pimps after the English pimps began to place prostitutes on Fitzwilliam Square. The following decade, Lyn Madden came to prominence after she gave evidence in 1983 against her lover and pimp, John Cullen, who murdered another prostitute, Dolores Lynch, by throwing a firebomb into her house. Lynch’s mother and aunt were also killed during the blaze.
It was an extraordinarily brave thing for Madden to do, given the potential for Dublin’s violent underworld to exact revenge, and the fact that she had spent many of her 40 years fleeing to the next brute to protect her from the previous brute. As she said herself, “I’ve lived in gangland for 20 years… and I know what ‘grass’ means”.
She was helped and protected by journalist June Levine who subsequently wrote about Madden’s life in Lyn: A Story of Prostitution, which detailed the abuse Madden had suffered throughout her life having been abandoned by her mother in Cork as a child.
LYN MADDEN ended up in various institutions and served time in prison in England and was exploited and abused by pimps whom she described as “vicious, slave-owning bloodsuckers. It’s not the clients who destroy women. It’s the pimps”.
Madden has just published an account of her life after the Cullen trial. She lived under Garda protection during the trial but when it came to an end and he was convicted of murder, Madden was then put on the boat to England by the gardaí. That was the end of the story as far as the Irish establishment was concerned. There was no support offered afterwards, no system in place to ensure her future safety and quality of life and no co-operation between the two jurisdictions to protect her from more exploitation or to guarantee her any quality of life. Her new book, Lyn’s Escape, is ironically titled as due to the lack of back-up she was forever looking over her shoulder. She experienced more encounters with violent men, fretted about her own damaged children and struggled in low-paid jobs. There is no happy ending, but she emerges as strong, brave, witty and self-aware and someone who has had to rely on herself and nobody else to survive.
Perhaps there is a lesson in all this. It is one thing to identify the women being exploited and remove them from the cause of immediate danger; it is quite another to ensure they have some chance at a better quality of life. Rescuing them and subsequently hiding and ignoring them is not enough.
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