Monto was the nickname for the one-time red light district in the northeast of Dublin , Ireland. The name is derived from Montgomery Street now called Foley Street , which runs parallel to the lower end of Talbot Street towards what is now Connolly Station.
In its heyday from the s to the s, there were anything up to 1, prostitutes working there at any one time, with all classes of customers catered for. Dublin was reputed to have the biggest red light district in Europe and its profits were aided by the enormous number of British Army garrisons in the city, notably the Royal Barracks later Collins Barracks and now one of the locations of the National Museum of Ireland. Later, in the s, the Prince, accompanied by his wife Princess Alexandra and their son Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence strolled unrecognised through the area, having slipped away from their bodyguards and walked through Dublin.
In Kevin Kearns' oral history collection Dublin Tenement Life , he comments that many of the prostitutes in the Monto were, like Philomena Lee , unwed mothers who had been disowned both by their families and by their babies' fathers. Although middle-class Dubliners viewed these women as 'whores', the impoverished but devoutly Catholic residents of Monto tenements referred to local prostitutes as "unfortunate girls", and understood that they had often turned to prostitution as a last resort.
According to Kearns, "By all accounts, the girls were typically young, attractive, and known for their generosity, especially to slum children". In an interview with Kearns, Mary Corbally, who grew up in a tenement on Corporation Street during the s, recalled, "I don't feel any shame in coming from the Monto, but the reputation was there cause of the girls.
We never heard the word 'Whores', never heard 'Prostitute'. Very rarely you'd hear of a brothel, it was a 'kip' and the madams we called them, 'kip-keepers'. But the girls were very good, they were generous. They were very fond of kids.
