Katherine Kavanagh

Katherine Barry Moloney was born in 1928 in Wilton Terrace, Dublin, into a family with strong Republican connections. Her grandfather P.J. Moloney was a member of Dail Eireann from 1919 to 1923, and her uncle Captain Paddy Moloney was killed outside Tipperary town in May 1921. Another uncle, UCD medical student Kevin Barry, was hanged in Dublin in November 1920. Katherine’s mother Kitby (Cathy) Barry (1896-1969) was general secretary of the Irish Republican Prisoners Dependents’ Fund from 1922 to 1924, and toured the United States in 1922 and Australia in 1924/5 to raise funds for the republican cause. Her father Jim (1896-1981) and uncle Con Moloney served on the anti-treaty IRA general staff during the civil war.

Educated at Scoil Bhríde, Dublin and Loreto College, St Stephen’s Green, Katherine afterwards undertook secretarial training. Employed for a time in Bord Fáilte, she moved to London in the early 1950s. While working there in office jobs, she joined a milieu of artists and writers including Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, George Barker, Elizabeth Smart and Anthony Cronin.

She met Patrick Kavanagh in the London flat of the poet Leland Bardwell, and after a nine year relationship returned to Dublin to marry him in April 1967. She worked in Quadrant Engineers, owned by her sister Mary and Paidin O’Halpin, until her own health failed in the mid-1980s.

She encouraged many younger writers including Paul Durcan, Macdara Woods, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Philip Casey.

She died in 1989, and is buried with Patrick Kavanagh in Inniskeen.