In 1835 Monsignor Kinseley, of Kilkenny, in a conversation with Alexis de Tocqueville observed in relation to morality that

Other travellers of the nineteenth century were to note the chastity and morality displayed by Irish women. The census figures of 1841 would seem to bear out these impressionistic accounts when it listed only six individuals engaged in the business of prostitution. However, behind the cloak of sexual morality lay an abundance of women who engaged in prostitution and who created a pool of individuals who had to be ‘rescued and reclaimed’ by nineteenth-century philanthropists.

Male and female philanthropists of the last century were concerned with problems relating to sexual morality, the most obvious and public expression of which was prostitution. But the problems of unmarried mothers, female intemperance, and the fate of women ex-prisoners were also grist to the reclamation mill. In this chapter I will examine the extent of prostitution in nineteenth-century Irish society and the nature of both official, that is government, and unofficial, or philanthropic, responses to this problem. Throughout the century there was little public discussion of prostitution.