Qualla: Kilflynn

Kilflynn: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dm4244, CC BY-SA 4.0. In March 1923, in a quarry near Tralee, Free State soldiers tied nine Republican prisoners to a landmine and detonated it. Eight were killed instantly. The ninth, a Kilflynn man named Stephen Fuller, was blown clear by the blast and crawled into a hedge with his clothes in tatters and shrapnel in his back. The Free State announced the men had been killed by an IRA mine they were forced to clear. Fuller's survival made the official story impossible to maintain. He eventually became a Fianna Fáil TD for North Kerry, and the Ballyseedy massacre became one of the defining atrocities of the Irish Civil War. Fuller's village - Kilflynn, population 126 in 2011 - is otherwise a quiet place 11 kilometres northeast of Tralee, hugging the River Shannow in the southern part of the Listowel plain.

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Image: Dm4244 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilflynn: Cill Flainn

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dm4244, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name's meaning is genuinely uncertain. Cill in Irish means cell or churchyard, so Cill Flainn could be the church of someone named Flainn - perhaps a hermit monk said to have lived by the Shannow, who legend has it was crippled and blind, and who was offered sight by the Virg...

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Image: Dm4244 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilflynn: Where the Ice Sheet Split

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dm4244, CC BY-SA 4.0. About 19,000 years ago, the ice sheet that covered Ireland split here. The corridor along which the split happened ran roughly through what is now Kilflynn, down past Banna Strand to an Atlantic that was then well offshore - sea levels were lower, and what is now coast was inland...

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Image: Dm4244 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilflynn: The Stacks and the Ponsonbys

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The Norman family who gave Stack's Mountains their name held this country for centuries. The Stacks owned Crotta and a string of surrounding townlands, their seat just north of Kilflynn. Then came 1641, the Confederation, the Cromwellian reconquest, and the great redistribution o...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Kilflynn: The Volunteers and the Tans

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dm4244, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 13 June 1914 a company of Irish Volunteers formed in Lixnaw, supported by men from Kilflynn. When World War I broke out, John Redmond urged Irish nationalists to enlist in the British Army to demonstrate their fitness for Home Rule, and the local Volunteer company disbanded as...

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Image: Dm4244 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilflynn: Ballyseedy

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kierandoc, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Truce came in 1921, then the Treaty, then the bitter Civil War between those who accepted the partial independence on offer and those who held out for a fully sovereign Republic. Kilflynn was strongly anti-Treaty. Among the Irregulars from the village were John McElligott, Da...

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Image: Kierandoc | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilflynn: The Quiet Village

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Plug at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. Modern Kilflynn is what most Irish villages of its size are: smaller and older than it used to be, with young people drifting toward Tralee or Cork or further. New houses have gone up. The school, Scoil Treasa Naofa, has grown its enrolment. The 18th-century Church of Ireland bui...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Plug at wts wikivoyage | Public domain