At the beginning of the lockdown, as a short poem seemed to capture people’s imagination, and the name of an almost forgotten nineteenth-century Irish-French writer flickered briefly into the limelight, our lobby correspondent decided to follow the trial of the “wrong” Kitty O’Meara

The poem “And the people stayed home” was sent to me, as it was perhaps to you, a week or so after the start of lockdown. We probably all remember a few snatches of it: the people who stayed at home read books, listened, rested, “learned new ways of being”, “met their shdows” and “the people healed”; and after the troubles had passed, people came together to grieve and dream new images, and they “created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed”.

It wasn’t great poetry but it caught the mood of the moment. The friend who forwarded it, along with a petition to secure virus testing for NHS front-line staff, had appended a note that was widely circulated at the time: “Kathleen O’Meara’s poem was written in 1869 (20 years after the famine).”

I thought it was beautiful and also remarkably pertinent. It very soon emerged that the poem had not, in fact, been written in 1869, as a close look at the text would have immediately made clear. The Irish people may have been obliged to find new ways of being as a result of the hunger to which they were subjected in the 1840s and they certainly prayed and met their shadows. What they didn’t do was heal. The poem had actually been written by a retired school teacher from Madison, Wisconsin, Catherine (Kitty) O’Meara, on 16 March this year, the very day, as it happens, on which Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the House of Commons that all unnecessary social contact should cease.