Built 1837, burned 2004, rebuilt 2006
St Joseph's Church
The Catholic parish church on the village road was built in 1837 in a plain Gothic Revival style - rendered walls, limestone quoins, a three-stage pinnacled tower with a castellated parapet and a louvered belfry. It replaced an earlier thatched chapel that had stood on the site since the easing of the Penal Laws in the late 1700s. On Thursday 12 February 2004 a fire destroyed the roof and interior, though the tower and walls survived. McCarthy O'Hora of Portlaoise designed the restoration, and the rebuilt church was blessed and reopened by Bishop Jim Moriarty on 23 April 2006. The pinnacled tower is the most striking thing on the road.
Faith in the Penal years
The mass rock and the holy wells
Local historians record a mass rock on a stream bank between Ballinagar and Ballycue, used for clandestine Catholic worship during the Penal era when the Mass was outlawed. In the townland of Toberleheen - the name itself means the well of the half-penny or the grey well - four wells appear on the old ordnance survey maps: St John's Well, the Children's Well, the Scurvy Well and the Lady's Well. A pattern day was held there on the 15th of August each year. These are field-and-fence sites, not signposted attractions; you find them by asking.
Ballinagar Historical Society
The ruins in the fields
The country around the village is dotted with the kind of ruins that do not make the guidebooks. Local tradition places an old church at Hackett's Lane on the Geashill road and another at Balleen Lawn near Clonmore. At Annaharvey there is an extensive ancient burial ground with a large artificial mound, said locally to have had its church burned by Cromwell. A field at Cappyroe is known as the Monk's Mounds. None of it is dramatic above ground, but it tells you the place was settled and worshipped in long before the present village formed around its ford.
Ballinagar GAA, founded 1916
The Dreadnoughts
For a village of a few hundred people, Ballinagar takes its football seriously. The GAA club was founded in 1916 and bought its present grounds in 1989, opening them in 1993. The standout year was 2022, when the club went 28 competitive games unbeaten and took the Junior A and Junior C football championships along with two divisional leagues - a remarkable haul for a club this small. A Sunday with a game on is the day the parish comes together.