Killurin
Cill Iúirín, Co. Offaly

A scatter of houses on the R421 southwest of Tullamore that, against the odds, gave the world a bishop of Chicago and an Australian MP.

Killurin is a townland and a name on a signpost, about eight kilometres southwest of Tullamore on the R421. The 2016 census counted 142 people. There is no main street to speak of, no shop you would plan a day around, no pub that research will let me name. It sits in the old barony of Geashill, in the parish of Killeigh, in the flat central Offaly country between the Slieve Bloom foothills and the bogs - the kind of place you drive through on the way to somewhere larger and never think about again.

The name is Cill Iúirín. The cill points to an early church or monastic cell, as it does across half the place names in Ireland; the second element is less certain, and local historians do not pretend otherwise. Whatever stood here is long gone. What survives is the name and the ordinary business of a rural Offaly townland - farms, a few houses, the GAA.

The unlikely thing about Killurin is its export record. For a place this size to have produced both the first Catholic bishop of Chicago and a member of the Australian House of Representatives is the sort of fact that makes you look twice at the signpost. Beyond that, this is a place to pass through with the radio on, not a destination. Be honest with yourself before you turn off the Tullamore road.