Teach Mhic Conaill · Co. Roscommon
A farming parish in deep south Roscommon, between Athlone and Ballinasloe, with a holy well, two GAA half-parishes, and Brendan Shine farming up the road.
Taghmaconnell is a parish more than a village - a scatter of farms, a church, two small national schools, and a community hall in the south Roscommon corner where the county runs down toward the River Suck and the Galway line. It sits between Athlone and Ballinasloe, closer to both than to anywhere in its own county, and most people here look to those two towns for the things a village this size does not have.
The name is Teach Mhic Conaill, the house of Mac Conaill, and the house in question was a church. The parish is dedicated to St Ronan, the same saint with footprints on the Aran Islands and at Clonmacnoise down the road. The present church is on the line of one built in 1805 on land given by Brabazon Newcomen; when it was reworked in 1961, medieval wooden statues turned up under the altar, carried in at some point from Clontuskert Priory near Ballinasloe. They date to the 1200s and now sit in the Diocesan Museum at Loughrea.
Do not come expecting a main street to walk. There is no row of shops, no hotel, no obvious centre to photograph. What there is, is real: a holy well at Shraduff where Mass is said on the summer solstice, the ruins of old castles and an abbey out in the townlands, and a GAA story that ended a long wait. The half-parish of Taughmaconnell makes up part of Padraig Pearses, the club that finally won the Roscommon senior football championship in 2019 after seven final defeats, then again in 2021 with a Connacht title to follow.
It is also Brendan Shine country. The accordion-and-ballad man who gave Ireland 'Do You Want Your Old Lobby Washed Down' farms an Angus herd here a few miles out from Athlone, and was given the Freedom of Roscommon in 2010. That is the measure of the place: quiet, agricultural, and quietly proud of the few it has sent out into the wider world.