[4] On completion of his education he returned home and lived for some time on an island in the small lake, then called Loch Irce.

[3] He settled for about the last seventeen years of his life in the area then known as Corcach Mór na Mumhan (the Great Marsh of Munster), now the city of Cork, where he gathered around him monks and students.

The church and monastery he founded in 606 were on a limestone cliff above the River Lee, an area now known as Gill Abbey, after a 12th-century Bishop of Cork, Giolla Aedha Ó Muidhin.

The people of Cork often refer to the nearby Catholic church, also dedicated to St Finbar, in Dunbar Street in the South Parish as 'the South Chapel', distinguishing it from the North Cathedral, the Catholic Cathedral of Saint Mary and Saint Anne, sometimes called 'the North Chapel'.

[3] There are at least six St. Finbar's schools in England, Chelsea, and Australia – at Ashgrove, Byron Bay, Invermay, Tasmania, Sans Souci (South Sydney, spelt St Finbar), East Brighton (Melbourne), Quilpie (South West Queensland), and Glenbrook, in the Blue Mountains.

[12] In Coventry, England, St Finbarr's Social Club was named in honour of the saint during the late 1980's attracting large numbers from an Irish background to socialise.