Ireland's first planned intentional community
The ecovillage
In the early 2000s, a group called Sustainable Projects Ireland bought 67 acres on the edge of Cloughjordan and applied for planning permission to build something Ireland hadn't seen: an intentional ecovillage. They got it. Between 2009 and 2013 they built 55 low-carbon homes connected by a district heating system that runs on woodchip and solar — saving an estimated 113 tonnes of carbon annually compared to conventional heating. A 12-acre community farm operates as one of Ireland's few Community Supported Agriculture projects: members pay a monthly fee and collect what the farm grows, three times a week, all year round. Eight native bat species forage across the site. Dark-sky lighting has been installed. Forty-seven more sites are in the pipeline when the water supply issue is resolved. It is not a utopia — it is a slow, real, working experiment that has been going for fifteen years and hasn't collapsed.
Poet, commandant, the Tipperary signatory
Thomas MacDonagh
Thomas MacDonagh was born on 1 February 1878 in Cloughjordan. His father Joseph was the local Catholic schoolmaster; the children were remembered as high-spirited, roaming the fields around the town. MacDonagh went on to teach at St Kieran's College in Kilkenny and later at UCD, where he lectured in English. He wrote plays, translated Irish poetry, and published the collection 'Lyrical Poems' in 1913. His late poems 'The Man Upright' and 'The Night Hunt' — both rooted in Cloughjordan's landscape and people — are the ones that secured his literary reputation. He was also one of seven men who signed the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on Easter Monday 1916. During the Rising he commanded the 2nd Battalion, Dublin Brigade, from Jacob's Biscuit Factory on Bishop Street. The factory saw little direct fighting; the British Army avoided it as they tightened positions elsewhere. MacDonagh surrendered on 30 April. He was court-martialled, convicted of treason, and shot in the yard of Kilmainham Gaol on 3 May 1916. He was thirty-eight years old. The museum on Main Street is in the building where he was baptised — free, volunteer-run, open most days.
One at each end of Main Street
The churches
St Kieran's Church of Ireland was designed by James Pain and completed in 1828 — half-way down Main Street, behind a stone wall and a screen of mature lime trees, the kind of small Gothic Revival building Pain turned out with quiet competence across Munster and Connacht. At the other end of town, the Catholic church of SS Michael and John was designed by George Ashlin and built in 1899. Ashlin was the partner and son-in-law of Edward Pugin, and his churches have the same confident Victorian Gothic hand. Two denominations, two architects, two ends of the same street, a century apart.