[1][2] Nic Mhaicín started working as a teacher, beginning in Wolverhampton and then with the Sacred Heart sisters on Leeson Street, Dublin.
She became a member of a republican club, meeting regularly with other women with similar politics to hers including Catalina Bulfin, Róisín Ní Dhochartaigh, and Caitlín Nic Lochlainn at an apartment in 21 Dawson Street.
On her second visit in 1935, she married Padraic Breslin who was a USSR citizen born in London to Irish parents and who was also working in the translating bureau.
The Soviet government would not permit her to return to the USSR, or give Breslin a visa to leave, which meant that she never saw her husband again.
[4] Returning to Dublin, Nic Mhaicín worked giving private Russian lessons and correcting examination papers.
From French into Irish, she translated a collection of short stories Fíon Francach (1956), Rene Bazin's An Chaoin-Fhrainc, Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian's An tIúdach Pólach (1936).
In her obituary, Proinsias Mac Aonghusa described the apartment she rented for 50 years as "an unofficial center of Slavonic and Irish studies and cultures".