evidence: Kitty O’Meara, ‘And People Stayed Home’. [...] This poem has been attributed to Kathleen O’Meara (1839-88), an Irish-French writer, since it recently went viral in early 2020, following the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s been claimed that Kathleen O’Meara wrote it in 1869 following the devastating Irish famine of the mid-nineteenth century. However, the poem sounds far too contemporary to date from the 1860s, and indeed, it’s actually far more recent in origin – it was written by Catherine ‘Kitty’ O’Meara, from Madison, Wisconsin, in 2020.