Qualla: Cloughjordan

Cloughjordan: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Ford Elliott, CC BY 2.0. Thomas MacDonagh, the poet who would face a British firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol on the morning of 3 May 1916, once described his birthplace as a place 'in calm of middle country.' The phrase is exact. Cloughjordan sits in the north-western corner of County Tipperary, almost equidistant from Nenagh, Roscrea and Birr, with the Shannon and Lough Derg a short drive west. There is no industry of consequence, no tourist circus, no cathedral. There is a long Main Street with a hardware shop and three churches, a railway station built in 1863, and—on the outskirts—67 acres of fields where a few hundred people are quietly running one of the most ambitious experiments in Irish village life since independence.

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Image: Steve Ford Elliott | CC BY 2.0

Cloughjordan: A Family of Rebels and Artists

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gareth James, CC BY-SA 2.0. The MacDonaghs taught at Cloughjordan's first national school when it opened in 1876. Joseph and Mary Louise MacDonagh were the first teachers; their son Thomas, born in 1878, grew up in the schoolhouse on Lower Main Street—now the Thomas MacDonagh Museum, opened in 2013 in the f...

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Image: Gareth James | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cloughjordan: The Branch Line That Almost Closed

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hywel Williams, CC BY-SA 2.0. The railway came in 1863, threading Cloughjordan onto the Limerick–Ballybrophy line, where it still connects—just—to the main Dublin–Cork spine. The classically-influenced station building, the stationmaster's house, the road bridge over the tracks: all part of a small cluster th...

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Image: Hywel Williams | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cloughjordan: The Ecovillage

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kweedado2, CC BY-SA 3.0. In December 2009, the first residents moved into the Cloughjordan Ecovillage. The community had bought 67 acres of farmland adjoining the existing village and laid it out around an extension of one of the side streets opposite the Church of Ireland. The design brief was strict: e...

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Image: Kweedado2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cloughjordan: Stained Glass and Stone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kevin higgins, CC BY-SA 2.0. Three churches face one another across a small town. St Kieran's Church of Ireland, on the Square, dates from 1837—designed by James and George Richard Pain for the Board of First Fruits, its cut-stone spire rising over the meadow once intended as a parade ground for the barracks...

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Image: kevin higgins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cloughjordan: The People Who Stay and the People Who Came Back

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. As of the 2022 census, 701 people live in Cloughjordan. The actor Patrick Bergin lives here. So did, briefly, the hurlers Dinny Cahill and Len Gaynor before careers carried them onto county sidelines. Cloughtoberfest, an unlikely annual marriage of gypsy jazz and Irish craft brew...

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0