US TV star John Finn cops a role in new TG4 show

JOHN Finn’s first glimpse of Ireland was from a ferry chugging into Cork Harbour on a misty morning in 1972. Raised in the Bronx, in a stoutly Irish-American family — his grandparents spoke in Irish at the dinner table — he’d long dreamed of visiting his ancestral home.

“Ireland was very different in those days,” says Finn, a respected 62-year-old character actor best known for the TV procedural Cold Case, and who had roles in movies such as Glory and Catch Me If You Can.

“There were no new cars on the roads. In the west, some households didn’t yet have electricity. It was a poor country — a poor country rich in culture,” he recalls.