Maíre Cruise O’brien
Poet who celebrated Gaelic language and culture undeterred by her famous husband’s reservations
MAIRE CRUISE O’BRIEN, who has died aged 99, was the widow of Conor Cruise O’brien, the Irish writer and politician; under her maiden name Máire Mcentee, also rendered in its Gaelic form of Máire Mhac an tsaoi, she was a celebrated poet in the Irish language.
It was, however, as “Miss Mcandrew” that in 1961 she first came to notice in Britain. Cruise O’brien, who had been seconded by the Irish diplomatic service to the United Nations, was embattled in newly independent Congo trying to prevent the secession of Katanga, which was supported by Belgian and British mining interests.
As part of a campaign to discredit O’brien, in which Harold Macmillan’s government was complicit, the British media highlighted the presence of a lady friend, whom they misnamed “Miss Mcandrew”. The campaign was successful in that O’brien was summoned back to UN headquarters in New York and relieved of his post.
Máire Mcentee, who had taken leave from her post in the diplomatic service to be with O’brien, returned to Dublin and joined him in resigning; both were bitter that colleagues had connived in undermining him. O’brien announced that they would marry as soon as he obtained a divorce from his estranged wife. They were able to marry, in 1962, in a Catholic church because he had married his first wife in a registry office.
O’brien emerged from the Congo a hero among enemies of imperialism. Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, enticed him to become resident vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana. Máire Mcentee attended lectures there on African studies.
In 1965, however, differences with Nkrumah, never a fan of free speech, led O’brien to depart for a lecturing post in New York. Máire Mcentee gave courses there on the Gaelic influence on Anglo-irish literature. Both were arrested at a sit-in protest against the Vietnam War.
In 1969 Conor was elected to Dáil Éireann and the couple moved to Dublin.
Máire Mcentee was born in the city in April 4 1922, the eldest of three children of parents deeply involved in Irish nationalism. Her father Sean Mcentee, a Belfast-born engineer and reprieved veteran of the 1916 rebellion, served continuously in government after Eamon de Valera became premier in 1932; her mother taught Irish at the fashionable, mainly Protestant, Alexandra College, where Máire became a pupil.
She spent long periods among Gaelic speakers at Dunquin in Kerry and acquired a fluency in the language that stood her in good stead, taking a first in Celtic Studies at University College Dublin.
She was recruited to the Department of External Affairs in 1947 and served in Franco’s Spain before joining the delegation to the UN.
Although she was admired for her learning, a sharpness, inherited from her acerbic father, made some colleagues wary of her; and a fraught love life did not help. She had a long affair with an eminent Celtic scholar, described by her in a memoir as a rake: it was only after the professor refused to marry her that she turned to O’brien.
Their marriage was happy and harmonious, even if it was an exaggeration for her husband to claim that “Máire shares my views and interests, only more so.” They were sustained by laughter, not all of it benign. Living in a bungalow on Dublin’s Howth peninsula, they enjoyed a panoramic maritime view.
In the early 1970s they adopted a boy and a girl, both half-african, half-irish. A car smash in 1978 left Máire Mcentee at death’s door; it shook the agnostic O’brien so much that he prayed to God for the survival of his wife, whose strong faith he did not share. She made a full recovery. Undeterred that her husband, who also spoke Gaelic, came to identify the language with a strident nationalism he now deplored, Máire devoted herself to writing about it and composing poetry in it. She was praised for her frankness about the experience of women, though critics noted a lack of the same realism in romanticising the traditional life of Gaelic-speaking communities. She was much acclaimed and honoured, but after she was elected in 1995 to Aosdana, an association of leading Irish artists and writers, sshe soon resigned when they elevated Francis Stuart, a sage, to their highest rank. She accused Stuart, who had broadcast from Nazi Germany, of being anti-semitic.
In 2003 she published a revealing memoir, The Same Age as the State. Conor Cruise O’brien died in 2008 and Máire is survived by her adopted children and a stepdaughter.