As the electoral campaign for the office of Uachtarán na hÉireann / President of Ireland takes place this month (October, 2025) – the ‘Race for the Áras’ – it is timely to take a look at the interesting name of Dublin’s Phoenix Park / Páirc an Fhionnuisce, the address of the impressive presidential residence.
The legal Irish version of the name was declared as Páirc an Fhionnuisce in the Placenames (Co. Dublin) Order 2011, made by the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht under Part 5 of the Official Languages Act 2003. This order was based on research completed by An Brainse Logainmneacha / The Placenames Branch (now attached to the Department of Community and Rural Development and the Gaeltacht). Before the Minister signed the draft order, it was scrutinized by An Coimsiún Logainmneacha / The Placenames Commission and then submitted to the public for a three-month consultation period. Before obtaining legal status under the 2003 Act, the Irish form Páirc an Fhionnuisce had been in official use since 1958, and was frequently used in formal Irish-language contexts for many years prior to that. (Note that the State had no mechanism of establishing the official Irish forms of its placenames until the creation of An Coimisiún Logainmneacha in 1946.)
As in any area of academic research, new evidence can always come to light to expand our understanding even of placenames whose official forms have long been established. The Phoenix Park is a good example. The earliest occurrence of the name Phoenix in reference to this place dates from the early 17th century. In 1611 Sir Edward Fisher, an English adventurer in Ireland (more information below), was granted a large tract of land in west Co. Dublin which had been parcel of the demesne of the Priory of St. John of Jerusalem. This included ‘all such crown lands as lie on the N[orth] side of the river Liffey and bridge of Kilmainham, containing 400 a[cres]’ (CPR, p. 200), extending from Oxmantown Green to Chapelizod. Fisher surrendered these lands back to the King for the sum of £2,500 in 1618, and ‘the said lands, with a house thereon newly built by sir Edward [at the site of the now-ruined Magazine Fort], were by his Majesty’s special directions … converted to the use of the chief governor of Ireland’ (CPR, p. 203; cf. CPR, p. 341). In 1619 we finally find our first reference to the name, in a record of repairs to ‘His Majesty’s House at Kilmainham called “The Phœnix”’ (Calendar of State Papers ... James I. 1603-1625, p. xxxi; see also ‘The Phoenix Park, its origin and early history’, C. Litton Falkiner, Journal of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. 6, pp. 465–488). Although this earliest reference explicitly referred to the new house and not to the surrounding lands, by 1654 The Phoenix had also apparently come to refer to the area around the house itself, e.g. ‘Towne Lands of ... the Phoenix’, ‘At the Phoenix [is] a very stately House now in good repair’ (Civil Survey Vol. VII County Dublin, p. 292). Other references to these lands in the same source include ‘the Phenix’ and ‘the ffenix’ (pp. 223, 247). On William Petty’s map Hiberniæ Delineatio (c. 1685), we find the name ‘Pheenix’ situated rather ambiguously above a depiction of a hill with buildings on top. If The Phoenix was originally the name of the house built 1611×1618, it would seem to have been transferred to the undulating parklands by the 1650s. Writing in 1820, Thomas Cromwell was quite adamant about the original referent of the name:
It is somewhat singular that the imaginary bird from which the park is generally supposed to derive its appellation and in allusion to which this column was undoubtedly erected bears no relation to the name of the manor from which it is actually called. This in the Irish tongue was Fionn uisge signifying clear or fair water and which being pronounced Finniské so nearly resembled in the English articulation the word Phœnix that it either obtained that name from the first English settlers or was by them speedily corrupted into it. The ‘fair water’ was a chalybeate spring which still exists in a glen near the grand entrance to the vice regal lodge and has been frequented from time immemorial for its imputed salubrity. It remained however in a rude and exposed state till the year 1800 when in consequence of some supposed cures it had effected it immediately acquired celebrity and was much frequented. About five years after it was enclosed and it is now among the romantic objects of the park.
(Excursions Through Ireland: Province of Leinster, p. 166)
By his own admission (p. 47, n.) most of Cromwell’s information ‘relative to antiquities, &c.’ was taken directly from The History of the City of Dublin (1818) by James Whitelaw and Robert Walsh; his account above is simply paraphrased from theirs (Vol. 2, p. 1306). Although they give a very thorough account of contemporary Irish-language scholarship in the first volume (Vol. 1, pp. 926–937), Whitelaw and Walsh provide no source for their claim that ‘The manor was called in the Irish vernacular tongue Fionn-uisge, pronounced finniské’ (Vol. 2, p. 1306). However, they also give the following footnote: ‘The origin of this name for the Park has puzzled many scholars unacquainted with the Irish language … The appellation occurs in many places in Ireland with the same import. A river called the Phinisk [in Co. Waterford], falls, at the present day, into the Black-water … It was so called because its fair stream is contrasted with the deep hue of the Black-water, with which it mingles’. It is possible that the derivation first occurred to Robert Walsh, himself a native of Waterford, due to his familiarity with the Munster river-name. (Walsh completed the book himself after Whitelaw died. Curiously, it is not even certain that the name of the river in Co. Waterford derives from fionn+uisce, despite later folk etymology: see An Fhinisc / Finisk River (#1166126).)
In any case, the derivation from fionn+uisce was accepted by our most celebrated placename scholar, John O’Donovan, while working in the Topographical Department of the Ordnance Survey. In an early glossary of placename elements compiled c. 1830–31, he stated that the Irish name Fionnuisce lay behind ‘Fenix, a River in the County of Cork’ as well as Walsh’s aforementioned Phinisk in Co. Waterford, and also that ‘Phoenix Park near Dublin has its name from John’s well where the Priory of Knights Templars had stood’ (John O'Donovan Manuscript, s.v. uisce). (Note that St. John’s Well is not in the Phoenix Park but south of the river between Island Bridge and Kilmainham.) By the 1840s, O’Donovan had changed his mind, stating that ‘Finn-uisce [Fionnuisce], clear water, was applied to the stream near the Zoological gardens’ (Ordnance Survey Parish Namebooks (par. Castleknock)). A memorandum in the Ordnance Survey archives from George Petrie, the head of the Topographical Department, to Thomas Larcom, Assistant Supervisor of the Survey, shows that Petrie and O’Donovan had discussed the origin of the name Fionnuisce and had concluded that it must have referred to ‘the small stream which is the chief feeder of the ponds’ rather than ‘the chalybeate well near the Zoological gardens’ (Ordnance Survey Memoranda, Co. Dublin, pp.152–154; see Appendix). (Petrie’s secondary argument, that the inclusion of the definite article ‘the’ in the 17th-century references to ‘The manor of the Phœnix’ strengthened the case for the name having originally referred to a stream, ‘as the prefix the … is only applied to descriptive names’, does not seem very convincing to the present writers.)
The suggestion that English Phoenix (House/Park) might derive from Irish Fionnuisce is unproblematic from a linguistic viewpoint. Indeed, the anglicized spellings of Finisk / Fionnuisce ‘clear-water’ (logainm.ie #13599) in east Cork (mentioned by O’Donovan above) show the same development during the 17th century: from ‘Foniske’ to ‘Finewxes’ [referring to the two townlands named after the river], to ‘ffanix’, ‘The Pheonix’, ‘Phenix’ and ‘Phanix’. Later writers, though almost always accepting that the name must be from the Irish, vary in their suggested location of this Fionnuisce ‘clear-water’. P. W. Joyce’s discussion of the name in Irish Names of Places, vol. I follows John O’Donovan’s derivation:
‘fionn-uisg’ [feenisk], which means clear or limped water. It was originally the name of a beautiful and perfectly transparent spring-well near the Phœnix pillar, situated just outside the wall of the Viceregal grounds, behind the gate lodge, and which is the head of the stream that supplies the ponds near the Zoological Gardens. To complete the illusion, the Earl of Chesterfield, in the year 1745, erected a pillar near the well, with the figure of a phœnix rising from the ashes on top of it, - and most Dublin people now believe that the park received its name from the pillar. The change from fionn-uisg’ to phœnix is not peculiar to Dublin, for the river Finisk, which joins the Blackwater below Cappaquin, is called Phœnix by Smith in his History of Waterford (p. 42).
C.T. M‘Ready in his exceptionally important Dublin Street Names: dated and explained (1892) repeats Joyce almost verbatim (p. 80), and historian Maurice Craig author of Dublin: 1660-1860 also accepted the name to come from ‘a spring of clear water - Fionn Uisge’ (p. 14). However, C. L. Falkiner, while stating that he would not ‘presume to meddle in Gaelic etymology’, pointed out other difficulties with the identification:
[although] most local historians and Dr. Joyce [P. W. Joyce, Irish Names of Places I, p. 42] take the name to be a corruption of the word Fionn (or Phion) uisg’ signifying clear, or limpid water (p. 49) … [it] is not certain that Dr. Joyce is correct in fixing the site of this spring as close to the Phœnix Pillar and the entrance to the Viceregal grounds. The spring at that spot would not have been on the lands original held by Phœnix house. Assuming the suggested etymology is correct, it seems more probable that the name derives from a spring in the vicinity of the Magazine, perhaps the rivulet that runs along the valley on the north side of the Magazine Hill (Illustrations of Irish History and Topography (n.2)).
In contrast, J. Daly (‘Curative wells in old Dublin’, in Dublin Historical Record 17 (1961) 12–24; see also Archaeological Inventory of Ireland (DU018-007008)) reverts back to the chalybeate well, presumably the same as that mentioned in Thomas Cromwell’s account above. This well lies at the edge of the park near the zoo, and Daly states that it was formerly called ‘Feenisk’. However, this is not a genuine placename; it is nothing more than Joyce’s pronunciation guide ‘[feenisk]’ (Irish Names of Places, vol. I, p. 42), which itself is an attempt to make the hypothesized Irish name fionn-uisg’ look more like the English Phoenix! Note furthermore that a chalybeate well rich in iron salts would be an extremely poor candidate to be described as fionnuisce ‘clear-water’.
Reasonable though the proposed phonetic development may be, then, there is no evidence of a pre-existing Irish placename Fionnuisce ‘clear-water’ as suggested by Whitelaw and Walsh (1818), followed by Cromwell (1820) and others. It is interesting to note, therefore, that we happen to have two references to the park from Irish-speaking residents of the city in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The poet Seán Ó Neachtain (born c. 1640), originally from Co. Roscommon, mentions neither stream nor well, clear or chalybeate, in his word-play on the park’s name in his comedic prose tale Stair Éamuinn Uí Chléire (c. 1700): we find the protagonist and his partner ‘ag déanamh aeir agus aoibhnis go tuluigh árd fhad-amharcaigh dhuilligh ghéag-ghlais fhéar-uaine dá ngoirthear Nead na nEun Aduadhain agus dá ngoirthear go coitcheann an Phénics’ [“going for a pleasant stroll to a lofty, panoramic, leafy, green-boughed, green-grassed hillock called the Nest of the Weird Birds, and commonly known as An Phénics”], before they are forced to leave town and head west towards ‘Áth Thús na Seachtmhaine, Baile Átha Luain’ [“the ford of the beginning of the week, Baile Átha Luain / Athlone”, a pun on Dé Luain “Monday”]. Note that this text long predates the erection of the Phoenix Monument at the centre of the park on Chesterfield Avenue in the 1740s. Nor does Seán’s son Tadhg Ó Neachtain (born c. 1671) make any reference to fionnuisce in 1728, when he gives the Irish form of The Deer Park, a common contemporary alias for the Phoenix Park, as ‘páirc na bhfhiadha’ “the park of the deer” (King’s Inns Library MS 20).
In light of this evidence, it is little wonder that the 20th-century placename scholar Risteard Ó Foghludha (Fiachra Éilgeach) wrote ‘Páirc an Fhionnuisce, accepted Irish form [of the name of the park] does not appear to be at all justified. Derived from a former Phoenix Lodge, remote from the reputed clear stream near Zoological Gardens’ (Log-Ainmneacha, 1935). Such doubts are clearly well-grounded, but the ‘accepted’ Irish form now has legal as well as official authority.
Finally, a note regarding the man who built the ‘The Phœnix’ house. Sir Edward Fisher (ob. 1631), amassed great wealth for himself in his time in Ireland (see for example CPR, pp. 92, 212, 218, 220, 221, 358): knighted in 1603, he was elected MP for Enniscorthy borough in 1613, and finally made sheriff of Wexford in 1624. In 1605 he was awarded a pension of eight shillings daily for life (backdated to October 1603), and he was made a freeman of Dublin in right of his wife Alice Edwardes in 1617. His sons-in-law included Sir Walsingham Cooke and Edward Chichester, both heavily involved in the Wexford plantation. In 1612 he employed a legal ruse (Chichester once described him as ‘counsel learned in the laws’) to obtain 1,500 acres for himself from the inhabitants of the civil parish of Kiltennell east of Gorey in Co. Wexford: put simply, he stole it. This directly led to the dispossession the chief of the Mac Dáibhí Mhóir sept in the area (who shortly afterward adopted the surname Redmond in English). This family was forced to move from its principal seat in Mountalexander, then called Muine Alastraim. All the evidence from his time in Ireland demonstrates that Fisher was an individual of intensely dishonest character, whose connections with Chichester, the Lord Deputy, enabled him to benefit from the largescale appropriation of land that was legally held by the Gaelic Irish inhabitants under English law (see C. Ó Crualaoich & K. Whelan, Gaelic Wexford: 1400 - 1660, forthcoming). Far from the purity of fionnuisce, the man who named his house The Phoenix had the murkiest of careers.
Appendix:
Ordnance Survey Memoranda (Co. Dublin) 27/5/1844, pp. 152–154.
Phœnix Park (origin of name)
My dear Larcom
... Respecting the origin of the {153} name of the Phœnix Park it appears certain to me, and O’Donovan also, that the name is derived from the small stream which is the chief feeder of the ponds, and not from the chalybeate well near the Zoological gardens. From documents of the middle of the 17th century, it appears that this Park was formed of two manors, “The manor of the Phœnix” and “the manor of Newtownland” which I think very clearly shows that the name was derived from a stream, as the prefix the {154} to Phœnix [sic], is only applied to descriptive names.The original Irish would be, Fionn-uisge, according to the modern orthography, and Finn-uisce, according to the ancient: and the corruption of uisce to ix, is a common one both in England and Ireland, as Llwyd shows in his comparative Etymological dictionary of the Irish, Welsh and Cornish. Fionn-uisge, anglicised Finisk, is the name of several streams in the south of Ireland. If we can make out anything curious about the origin of the name you shall hear it.
Ever yours,
George Petrie
27th May 44
(Conchubhar Ó Crualaoich & Aindí Mac Giolla Chomhghaill)