The poets who operated in Gaelic Ireland were normally members of hereditary families. They would have been traditionally educated in bardic schools where students would have studied for up to seven years to learn the tricks of the trade because the kind of poetry they wrote was very formalised: it’s not something that one could learn in a couple of weeks - it took years of training. You were trained in genealogy, you were trained in history, you were trained in languages, and you were trained in the strict metres that you had to use to compose the poems. Above all, you were trained to say the right thing in the right place and not to offend rival patrons whom you might need to employ you one day down the line. So they were well-educated, professional people.

In Ireland before the middle of the 17th century, we only have the compositions of male poets but there are examples in Scotland at the same time of female poets writing poetry - so we can’t say that there were no women poets in Gaelic Ireland: we just don’t have their poetry surviving today.

In terms of how they got a contract to write poems for an individual patron, normally a particular poetic family would have a particular connection with one lordship but that didn’t always work and especially by the late 16th century in Ulster, and into the early 17th century, that system of a direct link between a poetic family and a particular lordship was beginning to break down, and poets had to go around touting for business among various patrons - anyone basically that would pay them to write a poem.

And that’s one of the things that becomes noticeable the further you go into the 17th century, is poets start writing about the problems of lack of patronage: their traditional patrons have gone; there’s nobody left to buy their poems; and they have to look to new ways of making a living - they have to adapt to a new world in the 17th century.