The Firbolgs' noted King, Eochaid, was slain in this great battle.  But the greatedst of their warriors, Sreng, had maimed the De Danann King, Nuada, cuting off his hand and by that stroke deposed him from the kingship.  Because,under the De Danann law (and ever after in Eirinn) no king could rule who suffered from a personal blemish. 
     The great warrior champion of the De Danann, Breas (whose father was a Formorian chief) filled the throne while Nuada went

into retirement, and had made for him a silver hand, by their chief artificer, Creidne'.
     Breas, says the legend, ruled for seven years.  He incensed his people by indulging his kin, the Fomorians, in their epredations. And he was finally deposed for this and for another cause that throws light upon one of the most noted characteristics of the poeple of Eire, ancient and modern.  Breas proved himself that meanest of all men, a kind ungenerous and inhospitable--lacking open heart and open hand--"The knives of his people" it was complained, "were not greased at his table, nor did their breath smell of ale, at a banquet.  Neither their poets, nor their bards, nor their satirists, nor their harpers, nor their pipers, nor their trumpeters, nor their jugglers, nor their buffoons, were ever seen engaged in amusing them in the assembly at his court."  So there

was mighty grumbling in the land, for that it should be disgraced by so unkingly a king.  And the grumbling swelled to a roar, when, in the extreme of his niggardliness, he committed the sin, pardonable in ancient Ireland, of insulting a poet.  Cairbre, the great poet of the time, him, was sent to a little bare, cold apartment, where a few,

mean, dry cakes upon a platter were put before him as substitute for the lavish royal banquet owed to a poet.  In hot indignation he quitted the abode of Breas, and upon the boorish king composed a withering satire, which should blight him and his seed forever.

Lashed to wrath, then, by the outrage on a poet's sacred person the frenzied people arose, drove the boor from the throne, and

from the Island--and Nuada Airgead Lam (of the Silver Hand) again reigned over his people.