"[3] According to a 1984 lecture by Desmond Egan, "Ó Direáin's genius stands revealed - to the extent that we must look abroad for poets with whom his achievement might best be compared; to Spain and Antonio Machado's sweet intensity; to Russia and Akhmatova; to Germany and the bittersweet music of Heinrich Heine.
[6] While living in Galway City, Ó Direáin also wrote an Irish-language stage play about the life of Russian Symbolist poet Alexander Blok for the Taibhdhearc theatre run by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards.
Ó Direáin differed radically from Mhac an tSaoi, however, who sometimes wrote Dán Díreach in the living Munster Irish dialect spoken around Dun Chaoin, in that he preferred emulating T.S.
[6] Ó Direáin's early poetry celebrated the traditional cultural life he had known upon the Aran Islands and lamented both its passing and the mass migration to Ireland's major cities.
One of his best-known poems, Stoite ("Uprooted"), contrasts traditional Irish rural life in union with seasonal rhythms and ancestral culture with the drab existence of urban civil servants and office workers.
[6] At the same time, as his poetry and other writings also reveal, Ó Direáin enjoyed, at least to an extent, the Irish-speaking literary and cultural life of both Galway City and Dublin.
[15] From the literature of the Germanosphere, the philosophy of both Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler further influenced Ó Direáin's, "apocalyptic sense of a civilisation in terminal decline.
During the same documentary, Ó Direáin's daughter, Niamh Ní Dhireáin, recalled the very deep love that her parents felt for each other and that the happiest times of her father's day were always after coming home to his family.
In an interview published posthumously, Ó Direáin went on the record saying that he thought women who chose to build their whole life around their job were either very foolish or very controlling in a manner he had often seen among male careerists.
His views on this era are best expressed in his poems Éire ina bhfuil romhainn ("Ireland in the Times Ahead") and Mar chaitheamar an choinneal ("As We Spent the Candle").
[25] Another influence upon Ó Direáin as he aged was the Postmodern literature and Irish language poetry composed by Casla, Connemara native and Tallaght schoolteacher Caitlín Maude.
[26] Furthermore, during the early 1980s, Ó Direáin chose to take the risks of crossing what was still a "hard border" and the danger of falling victim to the ongoing paramilitary violence by Ulster Loyalists during The Troubles.
Ó Direáin travelled to Northern Ireland and gave a poetry reading at the Cumann Chluain Ard, an urban language revival club in the Ulster Irish-speaking Gaeltacht Quarter of West Belfast.
The title of the event and exhibit, which drew on university, State, and private archives, was "Máirtín Ó Direáin – Fathach File / Reluctant Modernist".