placenamesDrumgeely
Drom Gaibhle
Housing on Drumgeely Hill brought workers and their families close to Shannon’s airport and new industrial estate.
The name
These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
- Drom Gaibhle · Irish · main form · validated name
- Drumgeely · English · main form
Place & story
Homes beside the factories
Drumgeely Hill was the starting point for the residential development of modern Shannon. To support the emerging industrial estate, Shannon Development provided 136 flats and ten houses for executives beside the airport. Olive Carey’s local history describes how this initial accommodation preceded acceptance of a larger town plan: government permission first allowed development in stages as homes were needed. The housing answered a practical problem faced by employers trying to bring workers to the new factories. [2]
Planning a new kind of town
Architects Downes, Meehan & Robson worked with planner Frederick Rogerson on the wider settlement. The Irish Architectural Archive explains that relatively dense development was intended to put homes within walking distance of employment, shops and entertainment. Drumgeely’s houses and apartment blocks were an early part of that experiment. Rogerson’s surviving designs for the town centre also show how much more ambitious the proposed pedestrian spaces and buildings were than the centre eventually constructed. [3]
Schools and a separate parish
Community institutions followed the new housing. Under Father Eamon Gaynor, the airport’s resident priest, fundraising and organisation led to St Senan’s School and Mary Immaculate Church on Corrib Drive in 1966. The area had belonged to Newmarket-on-Fergus parish. On Christmas Eve 1967, Bishop Michael Harty established Shannon as a separate parish and appointed Father Tim Mullaly its first parish priest. The parish’s own history locates the town’s earliest infrastructure in the Drumgeely area. [4]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Population centre
- County
- Clare
- Barony
- Bunratty Lower
- Civil parish
- Clonloghan
- Coordinates
- 52.70564, -8.91736 (approximate)
- Logainm ID
- 1417278 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Drumgeely. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- The Birth of a Town · Olive Carey / Roundabout Shannon, Clare Heritage
- Pivot Points 25: Building the Future, New Towns · Irish Architectural Archive
- Parish History · St Senan’s Parish, Shannon
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2025-01-10. How this page was prepared.