placenamesFinuge
Fionnúig
Finuge’s cultural history connects Seán McCarthy’s songs with a conserved cottage and the rural training grounds of Siamsa Tíre.
The name
A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.
Recorded forms
- Fionnúig · Irish · main form · validated name
- Finuge · English · main form
Place & story
Seán McCarthy at Finuge
Songwriter Seán McCarthy bought a holiday home in Finuge in 1964, later making it his permanent residence after years in England and the United States. His work reached audiences through recordings by performers including Christy Moore and the Clancy Brothers, and through his contributions to radio. In 1994, a local committee formed to commemorate him with a bust at Finuge Cross and a festival centred on new ballads and storytelling. [2]
Sheehan’s cottage
The festival committee purchased Sheehan’s Thatched Cottage in 1993. At a celebration in 2000, Patrick Sheehan handed its key to storyteller Éamon Kelly. The house preserves a compact arrangement of rooms opening directly into one another, without a central hallway. Its limewashed rubble walls, half-door and cobbled frontage retain the materials and practical features of a traditional rural dwelling. [3]
An academy for the folk theatre
Finuge became the site of the first Teach Siamsa folk academy in 1974, an important part of Pat Ahern’s plan for sustaining traditional performance. Students received three years of free instruction in music, dance, song and movement, with promising performers progressing to advanced training in Tralee and the theatre company’s community cast. Martin Whelan first helped voluntarily with the Finuge building before becoming Siamsa Tíre’s general manager in the same year. [4]
Music under the thatch
Kerry County Council’s Architecture Kerry programme for 2024 recorded recent conservation of the cottage’s thatched roof with departmental grant support. It advertised a concert there on 12 October with fiddler Sheila Garry, concertina player Susan Motherway and guitarist Matt Griffin. The planned repertoire connected the building with regional music, including Cornelius Lyons’s Miss Hamilton and McCarthy’s The Nightingale. [5]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Population centre
- County
- Kerry
- Barony
- Clanmaurice
- Civil parish
- Finuge
- Within
- Finuge
- Coordinates
- 52.42051, -9.54357 (approximate)
- Logainm ID
- 1412434 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Finuge. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- The life of Sean McCarthy · Sean McCarthy Memorial Weekend committee
- Sheehan’s Thatched Cottage · Sean McCarthy Memorial Weekend committee
- Our history: how Siamsa Tíre evolved · Siamsa Tíre
- Architecture Kerry 2024 programme, page 11 · Kerry County Council
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2025-01-10. How this page was prepared.