Abbeyfeale - in Irish Mainistir na Féile, the monastery of the Feale - takes its name from a Cistercian abbey founded on the river around the 1180s. The Cistercians were Ireland's medieval agricultural superpower: white-robed monks who came from France via St. Malachy of Armagh, who chose isolated sites with good farmland and rivers, and who built up large estates worked by lay brothers. Mainistir na Féile occupied what is now the centre of Abbeyfeale's main square, and the town that grew up around it took the abbey's name. Then came Henry VIII's Dissolution in the 1530s, four hundred years of slow decay, and a final indignity in 1847 when the parish needed stone for a new Catholic church and the last visible remains of the abbey were carted into the foundations. The boys' national school now stands on the site. Church Street, where it was built, was originally Chapel Street - the renaming was its own small statement, made when Catholic emancipation was still recent enough that the difference mattered.

The town has a love story that violated 14th-century law. Thomas FitzGerald, Earl of Desmond, fell in love with Catherine MacCormac, daughter of one of his dependants - a man called William MacCormac, known as 'the Monk of Feale.' The MacCormacs were Gaelic Irish; the FitzGeralds were Norman. The Statutes of Kilkenny, passed in 1366, expressly forbade marriage between settlers of English (including Norman) descent and the native Irish. The statutes were meant to prevent the Normans from being absorbed into Irish culture, which they were busily being absorbed into anyway. Thomas Desmond married Catherine in defiance. Tradition holds that the union was conducted at Abbeyfeale itself, in the abbey by the river. The consequences eventually included Thomas's own death and political problems for his line - a Norman lord publicly going native was inconvenient for an English administration trying to keep its colony separate from the country it had colonised.

The statue in the centre of Abbeyfeale is not of a Cistercian abbot or a Norman earl. It is of a parish priest in clerical black. Father William Casey arrived in 1883, during the Land War - the long campaign by Irish tenant farmers against the landlord system that had impoverished them since the Famine. The Land League, founded by Michael Davitt and supported by Charles Stewart Parnell, was running rent strikes, boycotts, and mass meetings. Casey threw himself in. He helped his parishioners hold out against evictions and rent increases. He used his pulpit to keep their cause alive. When he died in 1907 the town raised a statue to him in 1910, which still dominates the square. The local GAA club, founded later, took his name: Father Casey's. The Wikipedia article calls him a 'Land League leader.' In Abbeyfeale, more than a century later, Saint Patrick's Day parades still mark his memory.

On the May Bank Holiday weekend every year, Abbeyfeale hosts the Fleadh by the Feale, a traditional Irish music festival that has run since the 1990s. The festival's signature event is the International Bone Playing Competition - bones being the percussion instrument made of two curved bone or wooden clappers held in one hand, descended from a tradition that goes back to ancient Egypt. The competition takes place on Bank Holiday Monday evening on an open-air stage in the square, in the shadow of Father Casey's statue. The town has a musical tradition that runs through accordionist Donal Murphy and fiddler Eibhlin Healy, among many others. In the 1940s, the Tobin family built a cinema in the classical style and a dancehall called the Abbey Ballroom. Big bands played the ballroom through the 1950s and 1960s, until the dance/pub combinations of the 1980s killed it. The cinema closed in the early 1990s when the multiplex era arrived. Both buildings still stand. The cinema is now a protected structure.

Abbeyfeale railway station opened on 20 December 1880 on the Limerick-Tralee line, part of the great Victorian project to connect provincial Ireland to the wider world. It served the town for 95 years, closing on 3 November 1975. The line went with it. What replaced the trains is the Great Southern Trail, one of Ireland's first major rail-to-trail conversions: a greenway following the old route between Abbeyfeale and Rathkeale, suitable for walking and cycling, with the old cuttings and embankments and station platforms still visible. Abbeyfeale's place on the N21 road from Limerick to Tralee means the town never lost its through traffic, and Bus Éireann still runs the route the trains used to. About 2.5 kilometres northwest of the town stand the ruins of Portrinard Castle - a Geraldine tower house on the north bank of the Feale - another reminder that this was once Desmond country, and that the abbey, the lord, the priest, the railway, and the music festival are all part of the same long Irish story.

Richard J. Hayes, born in Abbeyfeale, became one of Ireland's most fascinating wartime figures: as director of the National Library of Ireland from 1940 to 1967, he also worked as a codebreaker for Irish military intelligence during World War II, cracking German ciphers including the one used by spy Hermann Goertz. Phil Danaher, who grew up here, played rugby for Ireland and Gaelic football for Limerick and minor for Kerry. Michael Lenihan, born in Abbeyfeale, became Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of La Ceiba in Honduras - a Limerick farmer's son ending up shepherding a flock on the Caribbean coast of Central America. And Paddy Moriarty, who emigrated to Australia and disappeared in 2017 from a tiny town in the Northern Territory called Larrimah, became the subject of an American documentary, Last Stop Larrimah, released in 2023. Small towns produce people who end up everywhere.