The misses Flynn had been pupils of the famous Dublin composer Michael Balfe (so Joyce claimed) and, as their great-nephew put it, 'trilled and warbled in a Dublin church up to the age of seventy'. This was in the ancient Franciscan church on the south quays popularly known as Adam and Eve's, the name of which is evoked in the opening passage of Finnegans Wake...

    In about 1856 another of the sisters, Margaret Teresa Flynn - then about 23 years old - married in her turn a John Murray who introduced into this long line of Dubliners a new and rural strain.
    John Murray's family can be traced back to Co. Leitrim at the end of the eighteenth century...

    In the late 1850s and early 1860s John Murray and his wife were running their own Dublin tea and wine merchant's premises - in other words a pub called The Eagle House - in Roundtown (now Terenure), the same district into which their grandson (James Joyce) would  be born.
    The family situation in The Eagle House - a father and mother with a beautiful daughter and two quarrelling sons - is the basic situation in Finnegans Wake.

Biography by Peter Costello