Máire Mhac an tSaoi: Contradictory views in emerging voice

MÁIRE Mhac an tSaoi was born in 1922. It was six years after her father, Seán MacEntee, took part in the Easter Rising, a man who fought in the GPO, co-founded Fianna Fáil and served as Seán Lemass’s Tánaiste in the 1960s.
In one of her Irish-language poems, trying to tease out where herself and her father became strange with each other, Mhac an tSaoi wonders: “I am the same age as the state/ and neither turned out as you wished.”