‘The stinking whirlpool of abuse and ignorance’: the marginalisation of sex workers in Ireland, c.1975–1985

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the lives of sex workers in late twentieth-century Ireland. In 1979, at least 98 women worked in one small area of Dublin alone, and in 1980 many of them helped Jim Finucane TD produce a report outlining their plight and demanding support. However, this was a period of great uncertainty and change, and there was little appetite to provide progressive aid for sex workers. Political and economic instability caused anxiety about the future of the republic. The patriarchal and restrictive moral practices of the Catholic Church came into conflict with an increasingly complex, modern society. The impact of this turbulence upon the lives of Ireland’s marginalised communities has been under-investigated. Sex workers, whilst made visible in the Finucane report, have been absent from historical research. This article examines the relationship between working-class women and the institutions of Church, State and society. It highlights the abuse and ignorance sex workers faced in the 1970s and 1980s, linking their marginalisation to Ireland’s containment culture and the protection of a morally pure, Catholic Irish national identity. This research affords Dublin’s sex workers the attention they deserve within historiography concerning containment culture, nationalism, and feminism in late twentieth-century Ireland .