Máiréad "Peig" Sayers (/ˌpɛɡ ˈseɪərz/; 29 March 1873 – 8 December 1958) was an Irish author and seanchaí (pronounced [ˈʃan̪ˠəxiː] or [ʃan̪ˠəˈxiː]) born in Dún Chaoin, County Kerry, Ireland.

[1] Seán Ó Súilleabháin, the former Chief archivist for the Irish Folklore Commission, described her as "one of the greatest woman storytellers of recent times".

[6] The Currans were members of the growing Irish Catholic middle class produced by the Government-funded breakup and sale of the Anglo-Irish landlords' estates after the Land War.

Norwegian linguist and Celticist Carl Marstrander stayed on the island while studying the Corca Dhuibhne dialect of Munster Irish in 1907 and later persuaded Robin Flower of the British Museum to similarly visit the Blaskets.

During a search of the island by the Black and Tans during the subsequent Irish War of Independence, a terrified Pádraig Ó Guithín ordered his wife to take the picture down before she got them all killed.

[21] Sayers' memoir Peig describes her childhood immersed in traditional Munster Irish-speaking culture, which was still surviving despite rackrenting Anglo-Irish landlords, the resulting extreme poverty, and the coercive Anglicisation of the educational system.

[24] Peig is among the most famous expressions of a late Gaelic Revival genre of personal histories by and about inhabitants of the Blasket Islands and other remote Gaeltacht locations.

"Ironically, the standard cliches of Peig's memoirs and those censored similarly to hers swiftly found themselves the object of contempt and mockery – especially among the cosmopolitan middle class intelligentsia and the often covertly literary Irish civil service – for their often extremely depressing accounts of rural poverty, starvation, family tragedies, and bereavements.

In Modern literature in Irish, mockery of the Gaeltacht memoir genre reached its peak with Flann O'Brien's parody of An tOileánach; the novel An Béal Bocht ("The Poor Mouth").

As a book with arguably sombre and depressing themes and its latter half cataloguing a string of heartbreaking family tragedies, its presence on the Irish syllabus has often been harshly criticised.

It led, for example, to the following comment from Progressive Democrat Seanadóir John Minihan in the Seanad Éireann in 2006 when discussing improvements to the curriculum: "No matter what our personal view of the book might be, there is a sense that one has only to mention the name Peig Sayers to a certain age group and one will see a dramatic rolling of the eyes, or worse.

"According to Blasket Islands literary scholar Cole Moreton, however, this was not Peig's fault, but that of her censors, "Some of her stories were very funny, some savage, some wise, some earthy; but very few made it into the pages of her autobiography.

The image of Peig's broad face smiling out from beneath a headscarf, hands clasped in her lap, became familiar to generations of schoolchildren who were bored rigid by this holy peasant woman who had been forced upon them.