Qualla: Ballyhaunis

Ballyhaunis: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Ashby, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ballyhaunis grew up around the Abbey. That is what locals still call it - the Abbey - though it was technically St Mary's Augustinian Friary, founded by tradition in 1348, in the middle of the Black Death years. The town wrapped itself around the friary the way many medieval Irish settlements did, with houses, markets and pubs accumulating in concentric rings until the friary was no longer the edge but the centre. Nearly seven centuries later, the Augustinian Abbey is still standing, still a protected structure under the 2000 Planning Act, and still the place around which the town arranges itself. What has changed dramatically is who lives in those concentric rings. In the 2016 census, the percentage of Ballyhaunis residents born outside Ireland was the highest of any town in the country.

Read more: Ballyhaunis on Qualla

Image: Robert Ashby | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballyhaunis: The Abbey and the Dillons

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Director at the Ordnance Survey Office, Dublin, Public domain. The Augustinians arrived in the fourteenth century, and the friary they built attracted the patronage of the Dillon family - Anglo-Norman lords who developed the surrounding district from the 1200s onward. Charles Dillon is buried in the Friary alongside many of his ancestors; th...

Read more: Ballyhaunis on Qualla

Image: Director at the Ordnance Survey Office, Dublin | Public domain

Ballyhaunis: April 1921

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit nick macneill, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 1 April 1921, towards the end of the Irish War of Independence, the IRA's East Mayo Brigade was active around Ballyhaunis. Their commanding officer, Sean Corcoran, was killed in a gunfight with British soldiers six kilometres north of the town at Crossard crossroads. A cross m...

Read more: Ballyhaunis on Qualla

Image: nick macneill | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballyhaunis: The Mosque on the Square

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CeltBrowne, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ballyhaunis is home to Ireland's first purpose-built mosque - the first mosque in the country outside Dublin. It grew out of the Muslim community that took root around a local meat-processing plant supplying halal product to Middle Eastern markets. The town's demographic profile ...

Read more: Ballyhaunis on Qualla

Image: CeltBrowne | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ballyhaunis: Trial Currency, Annagh Magazine, MidWest Radio

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marathon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Small towns sometimes get chosen for things that other towns do not. In 1999, Ballyhaunis was one of several European Union sites selected to trial a local currency, the ROMA, designed to stimulate local trade and ease residents into the new euro. Annagh Magazine, founded in 1977...

Read more: Ballyhaunis on Qualla

Image: Marathon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballyhaunis: Bill Naughton's Alfie

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnArmagh, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bill Naughton was a playwright with Ballyhaunis roots whose 1963 play Alfie, about a feckless, philandering London cabbie, was adapted into two films of the same name - the 1966 original starring Michael Caine, and a 2004 remake starring Jude Law. Pamela Uba won the Miss Ireland ...

Read more: Ballyhaunis on Qualla

Image: JohnArmagh | CC BY-SA 3.0