In the 1960s the area achieved the status of being a popular folk song performed by The Dubliners, with the lines:

If you’ve had your fill of porter

And you can’t go any further

Take her up to Monto

Langa-roo.

The origins of Montgomery Street itself are in the lifestyles of the wealthy, in late eighteenth century Dublin when such people as Lord Mountjoy, because Elizabeth Montgomery married Luke Gardiner, Lord Mountjoy at that time, and Dorothea Herbert, living there in that period, wrote of being with her aunt in Mecklenburgh Street when it was a very middle class area. In a directory of 1847, there were many solicitors’ offices in and around that street.

It is not really clear why these streets became an area of brothels. One theory is that after Emmet’s rebellion there were so many soldiers stationed in the city that more room had to be found for them beyond the barracks in Portland Row that they were accommodated in Mecklenburgh Street and so the custom was there. But equally the shift towards a more seedy area may have come, according to one tradition, after two British regiments were posted to the city after the Crimean War in 1856. Certainly, as the bad reputation grew, changes of name were a ploy to try to lessen the resonance of the name. So Mecklenburgh Street for instance, became Tyrone Street.

Terry Fagan has written a whole book on the Monto, having worked on its history for years. He pointed out in a recent interview that in spite of the reputation of the place as a spot where there was fun, leisure and plenty of drink and sex, there was a dark side, and that lay with the notorious madams of the brothels. He has traced some of the most celebrated ones back to directories in the 1860s, so clearly some of the businesses were ‘high class’ in both their image and their clients. He points out that there was around 1,600 girls working there at any one time. Although some of the clients were even royalty (Edward VII for instance), for many of the women it was a desperately stressful and miserable life; Fagan notes that girls who became pregnant were more than likely to be thrown out onto the streets.

The most shameful and criminal aspect of the Monto trade was the ruthless treatment of women. It was not unknown for girls who suffered from sexually transmitted disease to be sent to the Lock Hospital and as Fagan says, ‘Were often put out of their misery… a favoured method of euthanasia was ‘smotheration’. ‘The Lock’ as it was known, was the Westmoreland Hospital for Incurables, so we can see how the kind of murder Fagan describes could be done at that time with a cloak of supposed ‘caring’. If a person went to The Lock it meant they were in oblivion; the place itself was never in the public consciousness, and it depended on charities, and of course it was only fitting that the British army should cough up: the British War Office gave £1,100 for each year between 1899 and 1906. Even today, Dubliners use the phase, ‘He’s locked’ meaning very drunk and therefore in oblivion, out of circulation.

The madams were well organised and knew how to keep their trade thriving; before regiments arrived they delivered business cards to the officers’ mess and generally knew about movements and deployments when it suited them to think ahead. But the madams and their women also had to be ready for trouble. One piece of oral history suggests that it was the habit to keep pieces of lead piping behind religious pictures ‘in case of trouble’. We have images of the madams through literature as well, as in Oliver St John Gogarty’s book, Tumbling in the Hay in which he writes of a Mrs Mack who had a ‘red brick face on which avarice was written like a hieroglyphic and a laugh like a guffaw in hell’.

The decline came after 1925, when there had been some impact from the Legion of Mary. Before that, there had been some police action, such as the planned raids on the area by Sir John Ross, the Commissioner of Police. Then, a familiar pattern emerged: the places were shut down in the Monto, so the women moved on and were soon an annoyance to the authorities in O’Connell Street and elsewhere. The Monto thrived again for a while after that. Terry Fagan has talked about events such as a murder done on the order of Michael Collins in the Monto: a madam called Betty Cooper’s brother was the target and he was shot.

Then along came Frank Duff; he was at first working for the St Vincent de Paul organisation and then his life was changed by a visit to a group of prostitutes, at which meeting he begged them to give up their profession. He heard the argument that has been stated ever since the oldest profession was in existence: if they gave up that work, who would feed them? What work could they do? Duff found a convent that would take them and he also was given a house for them by William Cosgrave.

In 1921, Duff founded the Legion of Mary. It met first in an old shop in Francis Street and steadily grew, eventually having around thirteen million members. But to establish his group, Duff had to confront the madams and of course they were powerful people. History and hard graft effected the victory: Duff and his team persisted in canvassing around the area, and then, politics took a hand because the British army withdrew from Ireland as the new Free State was born. The closures took place with a small payment to the madams (£40 – maybe not so small then).

When Monto was closed in 1925 there were 120 arrests; two madams were arrested, and one, Polly Butler, was given a prison term of six weeks.