Máire Mhac an tSaoi (4 April 1922 – 16 October 2021) was an Irish civil service official, writer of Modernist poetry in the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Munster Irish, a writer, and highly important figure within Modern literature in Irish. Along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin, Máire Mhac an tSaoi was, in the words of Louis de Paor, "one of a trinity of poets who revolutionised Irish language poetry in the 1940s and 50s." Early life Mhac an tSaoi was born as Máire MacEntee in Dublin in 1922. Her father, Seán MacEntee, was born in Belfast and was a veteran of the Irish Volunteers during the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent Irish War of Independence, and of the Anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War. MacEntee was also a founding member of Fianna Fáil, a long-serving TD and Tánaiste in the Dáil. Her mother, County Tipperary-born Margaret Browne (or de Brún), a teacher at Alexandra College, was also an Irish republican. Her uncle Monsignor Pádraig de Brún was a scholar of the Irish language. Her other uncle was the Traditionalist Catholic Cardinal Michael Browne, who was Master of the Dominican Order and, in his later life, a friend and ally of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. As Máire's mother was a teacher of Irish, she grew up immersed in the surviving Bardic poetry and in "the medieval aristocratic tradition of courtly love poems in Irish." She was also, according to Louis De Paor, heavily influenced by her stays with her uncle, Monsignor De Brún, whom, in addition to his priestly duties, was studying the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Munster Irish in the parish of Dún Chaoin. As Louis de Paor writes, Mhac an tSaoi discovered while visiting her uncle in Dún Chaoin, "a living tradition and a community conscious of its literary and linguistic inheritance, a world in which verbal artistry by accomplished speakers capable of responding to the impulse of the momentum sophisticated extemporary compositions. The extent to which the Gaeltacht of her early life was an imagined as well as an actual place has been acknowledged by the poet herself, but her relationship to 'the miraculous parish,' of Dún Chaoin is both the cornerstone of both her poetry and her poetics." Máire studied Modern Languages and Celtic Studies at University College Dublin, before going to further research at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and