Finbar of Cork

Name and origins

The saint's name is transmitted in two interchangeable forms: Bairre (Barre, Barr, and in the Latin lists Barrocus) and the fuller Findbarr or Fionnbharr, conventionally understood as "fair crest" or "fair hair"; the modern English "Finbarr" and the affectionate "Barry" both descend from these, and the York calendar's styling "Finbar Barry" simply joins the two. The Martyrology of Donegal makes him "of the race of Brian, son of Eochaidh Muighmheodhoin" — that is, of the royal stock of Connacht — and the Orthodox England list condenses the same tradition when it says he was "born in Connaught" and "became the first Bishop of Cork." His Life (which survives in Latin and Irish recensions, the Irish preserved at Brussels and in the Royal Irish Academy, as the editors of the Donegal martyrology note) opens with wonders about his birth: the Donegal entry reports from its first chapter that Bairre spoke in his mother's womb, and again immediately after his birth, "in order to justify his father and his mother."

Bishop and founder of Cork

The martyrology tradition surrounds Bairre with an aura of episcopal consecration direct from heaven: "Christ himself conferred the degree of bishop upon him, as is evident from his Life," the Martyrology of Donegal records — a legend, duly flagged as such, but one that shows the reverence in which the founder of Cork was held. The same martyrology preserves, from "a very old book" containing the Martyrology of Tallaght, the tradition that "there were seventeen holy bishops and seven hundred prosperous monks together with Bairre and St Nessan at Corcach-Mór of Munster" — the great monastic school in the marshland of the Lee estuary from which the city of Cork grew — and adds that Bairre, "bishop of Munster and of Connacht, had a likeness in habits and life to Augustin, bishop of the Saxons." Its notes on other saints let us glimpse the school's life: Nessan of Cork "gave his church to God and to Bairre"; Brogan son of Senan was his pupil; and a Caelchu is named "at the school of Bairre at Loch Irce" — the lake retreat traditionally identified with Gougane Barra ("Barra's rock-cleft"), the mountain lake at the source of the Lee whose island hermitage still bears his name and remains a place of pilgrimage.

The poem attributed to Cuimín of Coindeire, quoted in the Donegal martyrology, remembers what he was loved for:

Bairre, the fire of wisdom, loves Humility to the men of the world; He never saw in want A person that he did not assist.

One further glimpse of him in the martyrology tradition is pure delight: the note on Scuithin of Sliabh Mairge (January 2) tells how that saint, who "used to go to Rome in one day," was walking on the sea when he met "Bairre, Bishop of Cork, who was in a ship." Asked how he could walk the waves, Scuithin replied that it was no sea but a flowery plain, and plucked a handful of purple flowers from it to prove the point, casting them into the ship; Bairre stretched his own hand into the "plain," drew out a salmon, and cast it to Scuithin.

Repose and dates

No secure year of death is transmitted. The York calendar gives c. 633; the Orthodox England list places him in the sixth century; modern reference works commonly put his death around 610–630. This entry's frontmatter records the spread rather than resolving it, and assigns him to the seventh century on the balance of the tradition.

Veneration and later cultus

His feast has stood on September 25 since the earliest stratum of the Irish calendar: the Martyrology of Óengus (early ninth century) has "the feast of Barre from Cork" (féil Barri ó Chorcaig) on that day, its glossator adding his Connacht pedigree, and the Martyrologies of Tallaght and Donegal keep the same day. He is patron of the city, diocese and university of Cork.

The cult crossed to Scotland with remarkable strength. Bishop Forbes's Kalendars of Scottish Saints gathers the evidence: the Aberdeen Breviary commemorates him on September 25 as "Fymberrus," with a legend of his birth that agrees with the printed Irish lives; at Eddleston the yearly festival on September 25 was kept as the day "of S. Fynber, a bishop who obtained especial reverence in Caithness"; Adam King's Kalendar (1588) enters at the same day "S. Barre first bischop of Cathenesse"; he is patron of Dornoch and of the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, which takes its name from him, where at Kilbarr an image of the saint was clothed with a linen sheet every year on his anniversary — a semi-heathen cultus, Forbes says, maintained into the eighteenth century; and S. Barre's Island off Kilkerran, a chapel in Tarbat, and the Ayrshire parish of Barr carry the name besides. The York calendar's separate commemoration of "St. Fymbert, bishop in the west of Scotland" on this same day belongs to this Scottish material — see Disputed questions.