[1] Ní Chatháin studied at University College Galway (now NUI Galway) under Kathleen Mulchrone, where she received a B.A (1956), received a Travelling Studentship from the National University of Ireland to study in Bonn, and then studied at the University of Edinburgh where she received a PhD in 1966.
[3] She began her teaching career as a visiting lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently joined the Old Irish Department of University College Dublin in 1967, where she rose from assistant lecturer to professor over the course of the next twenty years.
with the historian Professor Francis John Byrne and later was involved in establishing an undergraduate course in Celtic Civilisation.
[2] She held the position of President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland from 1997 to 2000.
[4] In 2002 she was honoured with a festschrift entitled Ogma: essays in Celtic studies in honour of Próinséas Ní Chatháin, edited by her former colleagues Michael Richter and Jean-Michel Picard.