Earlier in his career, Kirwan had paid Saul for sexual favors. In 1884, Irish nationalists alleged that there were homosexual orgies at the castle and named Martin Oranmore Kirwan, the son of a prominent Galway landowner, as one of the participants. He might have been the author of the 1881 pornographic novel The Sins of the Cities of the Plain or, The Recollections of a Mary-Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism. Although John Saul was born into desperate poverty in a Dublin slum, he became the most famous of London’s male prostitutes and was involved in both major male prostitution scandals of the Victorian period.
