Research into the life of Kate Corbett, my great-grandmother, revealed a childhood that straddled the worst years of the great famine. Born into a relatively prosperous Dublin family in 1841

Kate grew up in a lovely Georgian home in St Stephen’s Green, sheltered from the full horror of the terrifying hunger that was laying waste the country and its people. She was later to become aware of the appalling conditions that ensured the plentiful supply of cheap labour, which not only furthered her family’s business success, but also furnished an increasingly bourgeois life-style with an abundance of domestic servants.

Prisons and workhouses were overflowing with the destitute and dying and the wretchedly insalubrious conditions spawned the dreaded diseases of typhoid and cholera which became widespread. Neither Kate nor her family were immune from the seeping fear of contagion. As staunch Catholics, they would have were expected to involve themselves in the charitable activities organised by the religious orders which were proliferating, within an increasingly self-confident church, to care for the poor and destitute. This brought them into, what at times, must have been fearfully close contact with contagion. I like to think that Kate’s humanity and courage, which would stand her in good stead in her later emigrant life, will have been forged in these circumstances.

She was aware of the muted talk about the resurgence of Fenianism within Dublin itself, as young men, impatient with its slower constitutional methods, abandoned the Repeal Movement in favour of the Young Ireland Movement. Her parents, now with a flourishing stake in the new post-Catholic Emancipation Ireland, will have been fearful that the insurrectionist rhetoric of its adherents would plunge the country into violence and destruction.

However, most searing of all for Kate were the images of starvation and death she would have been unable to shut out as she grew older. These pervaded the city as hordes of countrymen, women and children fled the famine-stricken countryside for the city. Everywhere hopeless, emaciated men roamed the streets and skeletal women, with thin children in their arms, huddled together, begging. She cannot fail to have been moved by the desperation with which the hundreds of gaunt skeletal figures that lined the quays at that time, clung to the hope of a better life, as they waited to be transported to the ships anchored further out. She could hardly have imagined the inhuman conditions on many of these ships that would make such a cruel mockery of their hopes, and that huge numbers would die before they ever reached their promised land.

Kate would have become familiar with the sight of long ragged queues of desperate men and women, shorn of all human dignity, lining up to receive a mug of soup from a huge cauldron in the open-air soup kitchens that were set up. I imagine that she will have been angered by the additional degradation of having to drink from a mug that was frequently chained to the pot in case of theft. The sight of well fed soldiers in their regimental colours supervising her wretched fellow countrymen with such little respect was surely one of the many injustices that fuelled the growing nationalism of the burgeoning middle classes of which Kate was a member, during the second half of the 19^th century. Perhaps too, it was such evidence of the cruelty and indifference of so many that prompted her, in later life, to seek meaning and comfort from a higher source by turning to religious life.

In pursuit of Kate Corbett, Anne Loughnane’s fictionalised but fact-based account of her great-grandmother’s eventful life in Ireland, Wyoming, and latterly in a Cistercian convent in England, is published by Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd at €8.99/£7.99.

For further information contact Anne on 0044 (0)1316698235 or 00 44 (0)7718700702