The name Kildeema derives from the Irish, with the "kil" element, from "cill", pointing to an early ecclesiastical foundation, the kind of modest monastic or church settlement that once dotted the Irish countryside in their hundreds during the early medieval period. Many such sites were never grand structures; a small oratory, a burial ground, a boundary wall, and the accumulated dead of surrounding townlands were often all that defined them. What remains at Kildeema today is the graveyard itself, a patch of consecrated ground that has outlasted whatever buildings or community first established it.