Most people associate monument listings with ring forts, passage tombs, or medieval tower houses, so finding a relatively modern domestic building entered into the same register invites a certain curiosity about what sets it apart from its neighbours.

The details of what makes this particular structure noteworthy remain, for now, out of easy reach. What can be said is that Killareeny sits within a part of Connacht where the built landscape carries layers from many different periods, and that the decision to record a twentieth-century house as a monument suggests the building possesses some quality, whether architectural, historical, or associative, that merited formal recognition. The practice of extending heritage protection to relatively recent buildings has grown more common as surveyors have begun to take seriously the domestic architecture of the early and middle parts of the last century, including vernacular forms that were once considered too ordinary to preserve.