What the name actually means
The Big Meadow
Cluain Mór - big meadow - is one of the most common place-name components in Ireland. There is a Clonmore in Carlow, another in Armagh, and this one in north Tipperary, and they are entirely different places with different histories. The Tipperary Clonmore is the small one: a village in the barony of Ikerrin, in the civil parish of Killavinoge, on the flat tillage land between Templemore and the Laois border. When you read about Clonmore's sixth-century monastery and Viking raids, you are reading about County Carlow. This Clonmore's story is quieter, older in a less dramatic way, and easy to misattribute.
An attribution the stones cannot confirm
The Writer of the Book of Kilkenny
George Henry Bassett's Book of County Tipperary, published in 1889, noted that near Dromard there were remains of an ancient church said to have been built by the writer of the Book of Kilkenny. The Book of Kilkenny is a real medieval manuscript - a significant one. Whether its scribe or patron built a church in this corner of Ikerrin is a claim that sits in local tradition rather than in any surviving document. What can be said is that the church ruins existed, the civil parish took its name from them, and the land around Dromard carried the memory long enough to make it into a county directory. The ruins are not signed or fenced. They are there in the sense that old stones in a field are there.
J.K. Bracken and the founding of the GAA
The Radical Stonemason
Joseph Kevin Bracken was born in Templemore in 1852, the son of a stonemason, and became one himself - a building contractor who expanded the family business into road work and monumental carving. He was also a Fenian, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and deeply involved in athletics. On 1 November 1884, he was one of the seven men present at Hayes's Hotel in Thurles when Archbishop Croke, Michael Cusack and the others established the Gaelic Athletic Association. Bracken served as a national vice-president from 1885 to 1887, and in that capacity chaired the 1887 meeting that adopted the rule barring RIC members from joining - the rule that made the association's political alignment explicit. He died of cancer in 1904, having spent his last two years in Kilmallock, far from Templemore. The GAA club that bears his name - J.K. Bracken's GAC, formed in 1992 from the merger of the Templemore, Clonmore and Killea clubs - competes at senior level in both hurling and football, which is rarer in Tipperary than it sounds. Bracken never played for it. But the club plays in his parish.