Maire MacNeill (1904–1987)

Máire MacNeill was born at Portmarnock, near Dublin, Ireland, the daughter Eoin MacNeill, an Irish nationalist, politician and scholar, and his wife Agnes Moore. Her father was a founding member of the Gaelic League and Máire grew up in a bilingual Irish and English household. After her family moved into the city, she attended Muckross Park School and then received a BA in Celtic studies from University College Dublin. From 1927 to 1932, she worked as a journalist for the Cumann na nGaedheal political party newspaper, The Star.

In 1935, she went to work for the newly-founded Irish Folklore Commission as office manager. She trained in folklore methods at Uppsala University, Sweden, before starting research on the Lughnasadh festival. In 1946, she published Wayside Death Cairns in Ireland. She left the Folklore Commission in 1949 to marry John L. Sweeney, a Harvard University academic and poet. Her Lughnasa study was finally published in 1962 as The Festival of Lughnasa and earned her a D.Litt. degree from the National University. She returned to Ireland in 1967 with her husband, and translated two books from the Irish, Fairy Legends from Donegal (1977), and Sean O Conaill’s Book (1981). Her last book Maire Rua: Lady of Leamaneh, was published posthumously in 1990.