The old district
Sliabh gCua
Sliabh gCua is the historic name for the upland country of west Waterford, between the Comeragh and Knockmealdown ranges. In the mid-18th century it ran a court of poets — a cúirt filíochta, a regular meeting of working Irish-language poets — and well into the 19th century it was a Munster Irish-speaking area. The language thinned through the famine and the decades after; by the late 1800s it was a household language, not a parish one. A handful of native speakers lived on into the early 20th century. The name and the songs are what remain. The parish of Touraneena and Sliabh gCua keeps both in plain sight.
An emigrant's song
Sliabh Geal gCua na Féile
Pádraig Ó Miléadha was born in the parish in 1877. He left around 1903 for the Mond Nickel Works in Clydach, south Wales, and worked there for nearly twenty years. After a long strike closed the plant in 1922 he came back to Ireland and ended up teaching Irish for a living. The song he is remembered for — Sliabh Geal gCua na Féile, the bright mountain of Sliabh gCua of the welcome — he wrote in Wales, looking home. It is one of the standards of the sean-nós repertoire. The hill in the song is the hill behind the village.
Green of the wine
Tuar an Fhíona
The Irish name is Tuar an Fhíona — literally the bleaching-green or pasture of the wine. A tuar is a small enclosed field where linen was bleached or animals folded; fíon is wine. What wine was doing in this corner of west Waterford is the kind of question Irish place-names leave open. One school guesses imported communion wine landed inland here on its way to a parish; another suspects a transcription accident centuries old. Nobody has a clean answer. The local place-names project at Tuar an Fhíona keeps the question alive in its name.