Caitlín Maude

Her mother, Máire Nic an Iomaire, was a school teacher, and Caitlín received her primary education from her on a small island off the coast of Rosmuc, Connemara.

She played the protagonist, Máire Ní Chathasaigh, an unmarried mother who experiences family rejection, a stay in a Magdalene laundry, and ultimately murders her infant child followed by suicide.

As a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Gaelgeoir community, Maude was active in many direct action campaigns by the language revival organization Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta, including the campaign that forced the Irish State to establish a Gaelscoil (Irish-medium primary school) Scoil Santain in the suburb of Tallaght, County Dublin.

[4] According to Louis de Paor, "Although no collection of her work was published during her lifetime, Caitlín Maude had a considerable influence on Irish language poetry and poets, including Máirtín Ó Direáin, Micheál Ó hAirtnéide, Tomás Mac Síomóin, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.

That influence is a measure of the dramatic force of her personality, her exemplary ingenuity and commitment to the language, and her ability as a singer to embody the emotional disturbance at the heart of a song.

The best of her work is closer to the American poetry of the 1960s in its use of looser forms that follow the rhythms of the spoken word and the sense of the poem as direct utterance without artifice, a technique requiring a high degree of linguistic precision and formal control.