The church of Killeely has vanished so completely that the burial ground is now the only evidence that a parish existed here at all, its walls and gables already reduced to ruin by 1657, as recorded by the surveyor William Petty.

The history of the site is bound up in a small but telling tangle of names and attributions. By 1250, a man named John Pincerna had warranted the lands of Killele to Bishop Hubert, suggesting the church was already an established presence within the ecclesiastical landscape of medieval Limerick. The name itself has attracted competing explanations: the 1906 account by Begley derives it from Cill Fiadiale, meaning the church of St. Fiadail, while local tradition long held that it was named for St. Lelia, a virgin said to be a sister of St. Munchin, the patron saint of Limerick. Her feast day fell on the 11th of August. The scholar Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, noted that this attribution rested on late authority, and Begley was equally cautious, remarking that it was difficult to reconcile the tradition with the older forms of the place name. The lands associated with the church, including areas known as Priorsland and Ffarrenykilly to the north of Thomond Bridge, had passed to St. Mary's House and were recorded as glebe land, that is, land assigned for the support of a parish rector, as late as March 1615.

The site sits in the Killeely area near Thomond Gate, on what were once the outskirts of the city. The graveyard continues to be recorded as an archaeological monument. There is no standing masonry to examine; the interest lies instead in what is absent, and in the layered uncertainty around what the place was actually called and who it was dedicated to. Anyone with an interest in how medieval parishes have left traces in the modern city, traces that amount to little more than a boundary and a name, will find something quietly instructive here.