She was the mother of Ulick Burke, 1st Viscount Galway, Margaret, Viscountess Iveagh, and Honora Sarsfield.
Helen was probably born in the early 1640s,[a] probably at Macroom Castle, County Cork, Ireland, her parents' habitual residence.
She was a child while her father, Lord Muskerry, commanded the Confederates' Munster army and fought the Parliamentarians in the Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland.
He fought to the bitter end, surrendering Ross Castle near Killarney to Edmund Ludlow on 27 June 1652 and disbanding his 5000-strong army.
[11] Arriving in Spain he found that he was not welcome and returned to Ireland in 1653, where he was put on trial for the murder of English settlers in 1642.
[12] Helen, aged about ten, her mother, her sister Margaret, and her brother Justin had fled to France already sometime before the fall of Ross Castle.
[17] Helen was forcibly removed from the abbey in 1661 and was accommodated by Louis Charles d'Albert de Luynes.
[18] Her brother Charles, Viscount Muskerry, as he was now, attended the court in Whitehall together with his wife, who was ridiculed by Elizabeth Hamilton who had been together with her at school.
[19] Helen MacCarty soon married Sir John FitzGerald, Lord of the Decies, seated at Dromana House near Villierstown, County Waterford, as his second wife.
[1] In 1665 her brother Charles, Lord Muskerry, was killed during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) in the Battle of Lowestoft, a naval engagement with the Dutch.