Musician Marcus Hernon has strong links with the now-deserted island of Fínis off the Conamara coast. His mother’s family lived there and it was where he spent much of his youth. Marcus and his wife Mary were determined to ensure its people were not forgotten and have done that via a new book as he tells JUDY MURPHY.

As a child, growing up in Roisín na Mainiach, Carna, Marcus Hernon and his siblings regularly visited his mother Nóra’s home place of Fínis, a 154-acre island just off the coast.

In Nóra’s youth, there had been 22 inhabited houses on Fínis, but the population declined, especially in the 1970s, when Marcus was a teenager.

“People started moving out gradually. When we were kids, there were three houses there, with three people in one house, four in another and one in another,” says Marcus, a well-known musician and flute-maker.

Fínis had a huge influence on him and while no permanent residents remain there, he’s determined to ensure that the story of its families survive, via a new book, Sioscarnach Mhuintir Fhínse/Feenish Murmurings.

It covers the history and more recent genealogy of Fínis, with pictures of its houses – mostly ruins now – and details of various people who lived in them, many of whom left a powerful legacy of music, storytelling and boatbuilding.

Marcus’s mother Nóra, who had settled in Roisín na Mainiach after she married his father, Pádraic, died in 1994 aged 68. After her death, Marcus began to feel a deeper connection with her birthplace and started recording the stories of people who had lived there, including those of his late uncle Joe and his aunt Máire.

Máire, who spent some years in the US in her youth, died just last year, aged 101, having lived in her own home, close to Marcus and his wife Mary, until she was 98.

With Mary’s help, Máire lived independently, and over the years, when Mary visited the older woman, Máire shared many memories about Fínis. Marcus didn’t know about this until later, but they were invaluable when the couple were working on this book.

It was his aunt Máire who had told Marcus years ago that a priest on Fínis had pretty much sealed its fate by instructing that the roof be removed from the local school, which had been attended by generations of children.

Marcus stresses that this book was very much a collaborative effort between him and Mary, who is originally from nearby Árd Mór. They gathered information and photos, and collated data from the censuses of 1901 and 1911, with his brother, Tomás, helping to cross-check details from those records.

Marcus laughs as he talks about the discrepancies in information given by people in 1901 and 1911. People gave a particular age in the 1901 census and then, when it came to 1911, provided another that didn’t tally with the original. He reckons it was so they could qualify for the old-age pension – this was in a time when officials didn’t have the ways of checking data that they have today.

It’s possible to walk from Carna to Fínis at low tide and they were doing that one day after Marcus’s aunt, Máire, had died. As they did, Mary thought of the previous generations who had walked that same stretch of sand.

Pictured: Marcus Hernon with Sioscarnach Mhuintir Fhínse/Feenish Murmurings, which is bilingual, with information in English and Irish. Photo: Joe O’Shaughnessy