Finn, Edmund (d. 1777), printer, publisher, and bookseller, is known to have been at work in Cork in 1766, but from 1767 he worked at Kilkenny, at St Mary's Churchyard (1767) and then at High Street (1767–77), where he founded, edited, printed, and published an influential twice-weekly newspaper, Finn's Leinster Journal, which had a large and wide circulation among the well-to-do catholic merchant and farming classes of south Leinster and east Munster. His retail and wholesale business included books, magazines, almanacs, stationery, lottery tickets, medicines, and musical instruments. Financial support probably came from his brother, William Finn (d. 1813), a prosperous merchant in Castle Street, Carlow, who owned farms in Co. Kilkenny, was a delegate from Co. Carlow at the Catholic Convention held in Dublin in 1792, and died 15 February 1813. Edmund Finn married the daughter of another Kilkenny printer, Michael Butler (d. 1779), who also worked at St Mary's Churchyard (1758–79). After Finn's death, which occurred on 5 April 1777, the newspaper was continued by his wife, Catherine Finn (1749?–1832), who proved fairly successful at the printing business until about 1805, when it petered out. In Wilson's Dublin Directory for 1783 she is listed as the Kilkenny agent of the Hibernian Insurance Co. She died, aged eighty-three, in 1832.
Edmund and Catherine Finn had seven children. The eldest, Michael, aged about eight when Edmund died, married (1796) Sarah Williams, a daughter of a Dublin bookseller, James Williams (d. 1786), and made an unsuccessful attempt to run his mother's business, altering the democratic tenor of the Leinster Journal and applying (without success) for a government subvention. In October 1800 he joined his brother-in-law, William Williams, in a banking venture at Kilkenny which proved disastrous. Edmund's brother William Finn and his wife, Lucinda (née Byrne), had at least three sons, one of whom, Thomas, was a journalist who contributed to the Irish Magazine, the aggressively nationalist monthly owned and edited by Walter Cox (qv). Their third son, William Francis Finn (1784–1862), a successful barrister, married Alicia O'Connell, fifth sister of Daniel O'Connell (qv), settled at Tullaroan, Co. Kilkenny, and was MP for the county (1832–7). He died 8 December 1862, the same day as his wife.