Her home in Kells, county Meath was receptive to all kinds of music and her mother’s love of operetta and the ‘shows’ was passed on and picked up enthusiastically. But holidays in Ranafast and attendance at the Irish language summer college there underlined the centrality of local songs and their interpretation in a contemporary setting. Influences in those years included, The Beatles, the Pentangle and Joni Mitchell. With Tríona and her late brother Mícheál, Maighread joined Dáithí Sproule from Derry to form the group SKARA BRAE. Their only album was recorded in 1971 when Maighread was fifteen years old. It proved a seminal influence for many groups emerging in the 1970s who wanted to explore their Irish language song heritage. Later, as Tríona and Mícheál joined the Bothy Band, Maighread trained as a nurse and continued to sing, both accompanied and unaccompanied at many clubs, gatherings and festivals. In 1976, she was a member of the grouping selected to travel to Washington DC to represent Ireland at the Smithsonian Institute-sponsored celebration of the American bi-centennial. In that same year she recorded an album with fellow participants in the US trip and also released her first solo album.

In the following years, as well as rearing her family, and working as a nurse in operating theatres, Maighread continued to sing solo and to participate in singing festivals across Ireland. She considered it a blessing to meet and have the opportunity to listen to and sing with the likes of Seán Corcoran, Joe Holmes and Len Graham, Eddie and Gracie Butcher, Geordie Hanna and Sarah-Anne O’Neill, Seosamh Ó hÉanaí, Darach Ó Catháin, Róisín White and Sinéad Cahir. This period also cemented musical friendships in Scotland with acclaimed Gaelic singers such as Mary Smith. It was 1990 before Maighread made her second solo album in collaboration with producer Dónal Lunny; Gan Dhá Phingin Spré – No Dowry. It became established quickly as a high-water mark for stunning renditions of traditional song in Irish and English and was followed by touring in Europe and Japan. In 1998, she recorded two songs with THE VOICE SQUAD for a John Renbourne album The Traveller’s Prayer. When her sister Tríona returned to Ireland from the US in the mid-nineties, they resumed their musical partnership and recorded Idir an Dá Sholas – Between the Two Lights (1999) – again in collaboration with Dónal Lunny. Maighread also toured with Dónal and his group COOLFIN in Europe, the US and Japan and with Tríona and Mícheál, in Nigeria and Ghana. She also collaborated with Neil Martin and the West Ocean String Quartet for a song cycle called ‘Oileán na Marbh’ (Island of the Dead) newly composed by Martin with lyrics by renowned Donegal poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh. Over the years she has performed and/or recorded many songs for various projects with musicians like Máirtín Ó Connor, Cathal Hayden, Steve Cooney, Iarla Ó Lionaird, Liam Ó Floinn, Tony MacMahon, Paddy Glackin, Mary Black, Michelle and Louise Mulcahy, Martin Hayes, Denis Cahill and David Power and also Liam Ó Maonlaí. She has collaborated with artistes in other areas of arts’ practice, including Colm Tóibín, Séamus Heaney, Stephen Rea, Alannah O’Kelly and Nigel Rolfe, Adrian Dunbarr, Druid Theatre and Conor Linehan, and Moya Cannon.

In recent years along with Tríona, she has joined forces with Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and Moya Brennan to record and perform as T with the Maggies, celebrating their shared love of the musical heritage of the Rosses and Gweedore in Donegal and more besides. Maighread and Tríona also continue to perform as a duet.