A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.
Recorded forms
An Nás· Irish · main form · validated name
Naas· English · main form
Place & story
A position with several roles
Lewis’s 1837 entry places Naas on the great road towards Cork and describes it as market, assize and former parliamentary town. His earlier history associates it with the kings of Leinster, then with grants, castles and walls after the Anglo-Norman invasion. These roles belong to different periods. A later administrative town can preserve memories of royal significance without its nineteenth-century streets reproducing the form of that earlier settlement.[2]
Walls, religious houses and grants
The directory records several religious foundations and grants of tolls intended to support town walls. It also describes parliament meeting at Naas in 1419. Such details make the town a useful place to study how government, trade and religious patronage overlapped. The rights of a corporation, the property of a religious house and the territory of a parish were separate matters, even when they all carried the Naas name.[2]
People & connections
John Devoy's nearby birthplace
John Devoy was born in 1842 at Kill, on the road from Naas towards Dublin. Naas commemorates this nearby county connection with a statue unveiled in Poplar Square in 2015. The distinction between birthplace and place of commemoration keeps his relationship with the town precise. Devoy's Fenian activity and long American exile made him a figure in transatlantic Irish political networks; he died in the United States in 1928. The statue gives that wider history a visible presence in the town.[3]
A chair returns from America
In 2025 Kildare's archives received Devoy's chair from Frank MacGabhann, a relative of the women who cared for Devoy in his final years. The archivist's account links this donation with an earlier one: Alice Cumiskey had given Devoy's papers to the National Library in 1938. Such objects and documents carry histories of preservation as well as ownership. The chair's return for display at Naas Library and Cultural Centre places an intimate domestic object beside the public monument, offering a different scale of remembrance.[3]
Both counts use the 2016 settlement boundary, allowing like-for-like comparison. CSO supplies the 2022 count on this older boundary for comparison only. The official 2022 Built Up Area has different boundaries.
View population figures
Naas — Census 2016 settlement footprint — census population
These figures use different area definitions. Read the boundary note before comparing them.
Naas, Kildare — 2011 legal town and environs; 2016 census settlement
Published census settlement populations
21,393people · 2016
Settlement boundaries changed during this period. Differences may reflect boundary changes as well as population change. Where a 2011 legal-town-and-environs count is shown, it has not been recalculated onto the 2016 settlement boundary.
View population figures
Naas, Kildare — 2011 legal town and environs; 2016 census settlement — census population
placenames