Finbarr Nolan
Contemporary faith healer, who according to folk tradition, was destined to heal by touch, writes
WITH his playboy good looks, long hair and black beard, Finbarr Nolan brought show business glamour to the old-fashioned practice of faith healing, and for a time was as rich and famous as a show business celebrity.
In his heyday, the softly spoken Cavan-born ‘seventh son of a seventh son’ was said to be taking home “sacks of cash” for “laying” hands on the sick, who believed he could cure a variety of ailments from ringworm and arthritis to asthma and cancer.
By night he drove his new Jaguar car around Dublin and spent the early mornings partying with glamorous women and celebrities in Zhivago’s night club, off Baggot Street. He was once pictured on the bonnet of the car with a big cigar and said he would rather go to a disco than cure the sick — although he later said he didn’t smoke and had been put up to it for the publicity.
But in a few short years, the teenager, who at one time had thousands queuing for the touch of his healing right hand, saw it all evaporate. He owned tens of thousands to the tax man. By age of 25 he was bankrupt and left Ireland, wandering around Europe before meeting a Dutch impresario who took him to Hollywood to see if he could reignite his career using his strange powers on the stars.
The American public were either less gullible or less superstitious than the Irish. “America was a disaster,” he told one interviewer.
He came back to Ireland and settled into a comfortable lifestyle with his wife and two sons in a grand home on Trafalgar Terrace overlooking Dublin Bay at Seapoint. He lived there in relative obscurity for the rest of his life, remembered only by those who had witnessed his meteoric rise to fame and the razzmatazz that surrounded it.
“Religion and belief in God has gone,” he said somewhat ruefully in more recent times. “What I did is very hard to understand, maybe very hard to believe and people became very sceptical... they thought it is a con job.”
To be fair to Nolan, who lived with the advantage and the curse of his gift from the time he was able to walk, he made no special claims to understand what power he had or how it worked. In the early days he never asked for money, but people were anxious to contribute in the belief that this was part of the healing process.
Finbarr Thomas Nolan was born the seventh son of a seventh son in the village of Gowna, Co Cavan on October 3, 1952 to a local garda sergeant and his wife. The ‘seventh son’ powers are rooted in Celtic folklore and as soon as he was born he was reputed, locally, to have ‘the cure’. His mother said that at the age of two she dipped his hand in holy water and he cured a neighbour of ringworm, a condition developed from contact with cattle and highly prevalent at the time.
Soon it became second nature to be called home when he was playing football or out with friends because someone had arrived at the house seeking his powers.
A slot on Newsbeat, an RTE magazine show presented by Frank Hall, went ‘viral’ in today’s parlance and soon hundreds of people were flocking to the small village on the shores of Lough Gowna for a touch of the magical power of his right hand.
“I came home one day and the street was full of people queuing to meet me — I threw the schoolbag in the corner and I’ve been doing it ever since,” said Nolan later.
The family later moved to Foxfield Road in Raheny, Dublin and the local roads and front garden of his home became his ‘clinic’. Interviewed at the age of 22, he said: “I don’t like the term faith healer, I have a gift, I don’t pretend to understand it, it doesn’t work all the time and when it
fails I can’t say why.”
His fame was such that when he stopped using Holy Water, because it deterred Protestants from coming to him, it was the subject of newspaper coverage.
Eventually he abandoned working from home, and under the management of a showband impresario, he toured Ireland holding ‘clinics’ in town halls and hotel ballrooms. From initially not charging any fee, he was receiving £7 a consultation and was said to be earning over £1,500 a day.
“The money was flowing in the door, we would carry it out of the hall in sacks,” said Nolan. “I wasn’t interested in money at the time.”
A huge tax bill in 1978 led to him leaving Ireland bankrupt to travel around Europe and later the United States. In Miami a well-known medical researcher Dr Robert E Wilmer said he carried out scientific research on 10 patients, telling them Nolan was a medical student from Dublin. He was astonished when, after seeing the patients three times, two showed a dramatic improvement in their condition, three had a positive response and four showed no sign of change (one dropped out.)
“I wish only to point out that a very definite phenomenon appears to have occurred when Finbarr Nolan performs his touch healing,” concluded Wilmer.
Back in Ireland in 1987, he attempted to revive his career, but the media had lost interest in his story, only to report that just 15 people showed up when he booked a room in White’s Hotel in Wexford for a week.
The excitement that he had generated as a young man had evaporated, times and people had changed. But Nolan continued to do what he did quietly, operating from his home in Monkstown, Co Dublin. There were occasional pieces in the newspapers but the fame of the “seventh son of a seventh son” was largely forgotten in the new age of the internet and medical technology.
Asked by one interviewer later in life what he would have done if he hadn’t devoted his life to the ‘cure’, he said he would probably have stayed in school and become an architect. But he seemed content that he had spent a lifetime dispensing his special gift without ever trying to understand where it came from.
Finbarr Nolan died on June 2 in the Blackrock Hospice in Dublin at the age of 67. He is survived by his wife Caroline and his sons Barry and Shane and five of his six brothers.
His funeral takes place in Dublin tomorrow.