As Máire's mother was a teacher of Irish, she grew up immersed in the surviving Bardic poetry and in "the medieval aristocratic tradition of courtly love poems in Irish." She was also, according to Louis De Paor, heavily influenced by her stays with her uncle, Monsignor De Brún, in the County Kerry Gaeltacht village of Dún Chaoin. As De Paor writes, she discovered in Dún Chaoin, "a living tradition and a community conscious of its literary and linguistic inheritance, a world in which verbal artistry by accomplished speakers capable of responding to the impulse of the momentum sophisticated extemporary compositions. The extent to which the Gaeltacht of her early life was an imagined as well as an actual place has been acknowledged by the poet herself, but her relationship to 'the miraculous parish,' of Dún Chaoin is both the cornerstone of both her poetry and her poetics."