THEY were known as the wrens of the Curragh because they lived in holes in the ground. Over their one hundred years "the wrens became briefly celebrated when their plight was investigated by a journalist from the Pall Mall Gazette, and were" then forgotten. They deserve to be remembered and commemorated, if only as a reminder of the bottomless human capacity, for hypocrisy.
We tend to think of prostitution as an urban phenomenon, but Con Costello's recent history of the Curragh camp, A Most delightful Station (Collins Press), reminds us that prostitution of the most appalling and impoverished variety was once a commonplace there. The authorities responded alternately with indifference, perplexity and an imprecise savagery.
A Captain Hill was appointed resident magistrate to tackle the problem. Reportedly, he had all the women found loitering around the camp arrested as vagrants and trespassers and sent to the county jail for two months.
Pathetic Booths
A gallant gentleman indeed yet his conduct seems mild compared to that of others. One British officer reported how in 1844 a local priest led a military fatigue party in the destruction and burning of the pathetic booths some poor women had built against the barrack wall. This same fine Christian gentleman used regularly to grab prostitutes and cut off their hair.
In 1845, a priest in Newbridge threw a woman in the street on to the ground, tore off her shawl, and flogged her bare shoulders with his riding crop, her blood splattering over his shoes. She never resisted, but merely cried piteously for mercy, unaided by either the men or women who were witnesses. Five days later the young girl was still so badly injured she could not bear to cover the open wounds with clothes.
Few people seem to have taken the least interest in protecting these unfortunate women, and some priests clearly assumed they had the right to chastise them physically whenever they wanted. Reverend Fennell in Templemore struck a woman in the fond belief he could do so with impunity. However, the victim was the wife of a soldier, a Private Logan, who took the priest before the petty sessions, where Fennell was fined £1 and costs.
It was not all a question of official disdain or hostility towards these prostitutes. One hundred pounds a year was secretly paid out of government funds for the maintenance and treatment of abandoned women from the Curragh Camp, and Con Costello has found records of other such payments at army headquarters in Kilmainham and in Naas Union Workhouse. Other moneys were set aside for the treatment of VD amongst prostitutes, of whom there were, according to that peculiarly Victorian document, the census, seventy in Kildare alone.
Census Reports
The sedulous Victorian census takers of 1861 recorded that there were 1,057 prostitutes in Ireland, and of the 590 of them plying their trade in Leinster, 518 were Catholic, 68 Church of Ireland, and four Methodist. One surprising aspect is provided by the 147 brothel keepers, all but seven of whom were women. We even know the religion of these worthies 130 Catholic, 14 Church of Ireland and three Jewish. By the 1860s, Naas workhouse was spending over £354 on the relief of prostitutes.
Perhaps those prostitutes and those brothel minders were the measured and measurable dimension of a far larger and uncensured community of women who lived in appalling conditions in the wild and amongst the furze of the Curragh the wrens. Hundreds of these were living in all weathers in the open, refused all charity by the citizens of Naas and Newbridge. Even their attempts to buy a twist of tea were rebuffed. When these prostitutes as such they were attempted to make a shelter on the Curragh, it was pulled down by police.
Instead, they huddled in groups of three or four in holes and skulked in ditches and slept in gaps between the furze, in rain and snow. The Curragh ranger, a Mr Browne, wrote to The Irish Times, saying that the women were like esquimaux. "When it snowed, they lay with their backs upwards to form a temporary support for the snow to rest upon, and which, when it accumulated kept them partially warm.
Very possibly Mr Browne's notions about the construction of the igloo were more fanciful than observed but at least he did express concern about the conditions in which the prostitutes were living. Military interest was no doubt engined most of all by the need to keep soldiers disease free, rather than by a compassion for the women or girls. A special law designated the Curragh as an area in which the military had the power to imprison a prostitute in a special hospital until she was cured, or rather, it was thought she was cured in those pre antibiotic days.
True Horrors
The banker and landowner John La Touche, a veteran of heroic toils amongst the "fallen" women of London, and who raised a mission to help their fellows on Marlborough Street in Dublin, to "help them abandon their evil course and to submit to moral and religious training", had something similar in mind for the Curragh.
It took a visit by a journalist from the Pall Mall Gazette to reveal the true horrors of the Curragh underground "nests" of women, made of sods and gorse, each containing between three to eight women. Some of them had been living thus for years, half naked and freezing in the daytime, huddling naked in straw at night, the older ones minding whatever children might be present while the others solicited soldiers for business on the plain.
It is an abominable story, and needless to say, only a small part of Con Costello's fascinating and far broader account of the Curragh as a British military base before independence. He tells the whole with the balance, the decency and the scholarship that one might expect from one who is, unquestionably, a soldier, a gentleman and a scholar.