Tanaiste 2026 - 27 Mary O'Malley Madec

Mary O'Malley Madec and friend at the 2023 Gathering on Clare Island

Mary Madec grew up Mary O'Malley near Westport Co. Mayo and returned to live there in 2023. She has a Master's in Old English from the University of Galway and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania focusing on language contact phenomena in the speech of native speakers of Irish. She has taught English and sociolinguistics at University of Galway French and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and since 2002 teaches for Villanova University in Ireland and coordinates the Education Abroad programme onsite. Her publications in linguistics have examined some elements in Irish Travellers' Cant and discourse marking in the speech of native Irish speakers.

In the early noughties she started to take her creative writing more seriously and in 2008 she won the Hennessy XO Prize for Emerging Poetry and since then has published three collections with Salmon Poetry: In Other Words 2010 followed by Demeter Does Not Remember in 2014 and The Egret Lands With News From Other Parts in November 2019. She lieks to share poetry in community settigns and has worked with underserved populations such as people with intellectual disabilities. After two years of workshops in Connemara, she edited Jessica Casey & Other Stories which appeared from Salmon Poetry in 2011, showcasing their work ollowing a multi-award winning project funded by an Arts Participation Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. She co-authored a fundraiser volume Bosom Pals by women poets who had breast cancer which was published by Doire Press in 2017 , worked with The National Orchestra and That's Life (Brothers of Charity Services, now Corlann, Galway) on an open foyer event for Fledermaus. She also explored the myth of Eurydice in a teaching project with a group of service called Among the Trees which was showcased by Cúirt 2022 and in that year also she worked with Vanessa Earl on the SALT project (on winter sea swimming and wrote a poem for the performance which was a resounding success with an audience of 600 people in Kinvara, Co Galway and 1,200 on Ladies' Beach, Galway.

Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines, including The Irish Times and Poetry Ireland and she in recent times been an invited reader at HoCoPoLitSo Maryland, online February 11, 2022, The University of Missouri Global Program 12.10.2020; The Holding Cell, Facebook May 17, 2020 (2,600 views): The Chinese University of Hong Kong, September 2018 and the Festival International de Poésie, Marrakech April 2017 as well as locally in Galway and Mayo. She read a poem about her autistic twin on the Ryan Turbidy Morning Show (RTÉ 1) March 1, 2017, and is planning to make this the subject of a collection.

Her fourth collection, The Ghost in the Bole, (for which she gratefully acknowledges a literature bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland, 2022) takes the myth of Eurydice to explore grief in the ecosystem of her own life and of the trees. In this work she deftly addresses pain and loss not only on a personal level but at the level of the environment.

In 1985 she married Claude Madec and had two boys with him, Andrew and Philippe. They divorced in 2013. She is now married to Conall O'Cuinn and lives in Westport, Co. Mayo.

Mary's father Andrew was Joint Secretary of the O'Malley Clan for many years and her brother Tom was Chieftain  No 65.