When Isabella and Catherine opened their school on the 12th October 1800 the harsh Penal Laws were still in force. Catholics had very few rights. Most people were very poor. Food was scarce. The clothes people wore were just rags. According to a newspaper report in 1801, several people died of starvation in Kilkenny City. During one year coal was given out to 6,000 poor families and over 40,000 meals were given out from a soup kitchen during the very severe winter of 1811. People lived in overcrowded rooms. One home behind the school was described as a "dark cellar with two parents, four children, a pig, a donkey and a dog."

Apart from teaching the children, Isabella and Catherine, and the other Presentation Sisters who joined them, often provided food and clothing for the girls who came to their school in Kilkenny. During her lifetime Isabella wrote detailed accounts of her activities. Her successors preserved many of her writings as mementos. She wrote the following in 1801: "Provisions were enormously high this last year; the poor were starving and we were obliged to feed the children frequently."

Sir Walter Scott, author and poet visited Kilkenny in 1825. In his Journal he wrote: "Their poverty is not exaggerated. It is on the extreme edge of human misery. Their cottages would scarce serve as pig stys even in Scotland. And their rags seem the very refuse of the rag shop."

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