| Naas Nás na Riogh | ||
| Image:Naascoatofarms.jpg | ||
|---|---|---|
| Prudens ut Serpens The Wisdom of the Snake | ||
| Location | ||
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| Irish Grid Reference N893196 | ||
| Statistics | ||
| Province: | Leinster | |
| County: | County Kildare | |
| Elevation: | 114 m | |
| Population (2002) | 18,288 | |
| Website: www.naas.ie | ||
Naas (pronounced /neɪs/; Irish: Nás na Riogh /nɑːs nə riː/ or An Nás /ən nɑːs/) is the county town of County Kildare, Ireland. It is a major commuter belt town, with many people living in Naas and working in Dublin. The nearby M7 motorway, which bypasses Naas and connects Dublin to the South and Southwest, is one of the busiest routes in the country.
Naas town ('Nás na Riogh') as it was called in Irish is the "Meeting Place of Kings" because of its ancient location as a cross-roads to and from Dublin, and its traditional location as the principal governmental administrative centre in the county. Naas is located 32 kilometres (20 miles) west of Ireland's capital. According to the preliminary census reports the town's 2006 population was 21,715 (including rural area). The town's 4,000 new arrivals in the last five years are Ireland's Young Europeans: well educated and upwardly mobile home buyers, who share a technical culture as local hi-tech employees of Intel, Xilinx, Hewlett Packard, and many others. At one point in 2004, Naas was one of the fastest growing towns in western Europe. It is in fact the 16th largest town in the Republic of Ireland. The town is planning new housing estates in the next five years for a larger capacity of 30,000. Over the last year there has been a large influx of people from Eastern European countries like Latvia, Estonia and particularly Poland giving the town a large sense of cultural diversity.
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Amenities in the town include: library, swimming pool, a new, full modernised Gaelic Athletic Association club, two Roman Catholic Churches, one Church of Ireland Church, one Presbyterian Church, three Secondary schools, two or three primary schools, tax office, Naas General Hospital, horse race course, soccer club, rugby club, two major nightclubs, several pubs, three supermarkets, county council offices, a number of hotels and the new state-of-the-art Moat Theatre. The Church of Our Lady & St. David is a Roman Catholic Parish Church dating from 1827. The original parish church, St. David's Church, is held by the Church of Ireland. In 1997, the second Catholic Church opened in Ballycane on the east side of town and was dedicated to the Irish Martyrs.
One of the first battles of the rebellion of 1798 took place in Naas on 24 May 1798 when a force of about 1,000 rebels was defeated in an unsuccessful attack on the town. It is worth noting that the leader of the rebellion of 1798 Theobald Wolfe Tone is buried just outside Naas in Bodenstown. During World War II, Naas was the site of Ireland's prisoner of war (P.O.W.) camp (the Curragh prisoner of war camp). Because Ireland was officially neutral during that war, Ireland interned military personnel from any belligerent who ended up in Irish territory; as a result, the P.O.W. camp in Naas housed American, British, and German soldiers all together in the same camp. (A motion picture, The Brylcreem Boys, was produced in the 1990s which depicted life at the Irish internment camp.)
Punchestown Racecourse is just to the south east of the town, and the annual Punchestown Race Festival takes over the town for a whole week in April. The Oxegen music festival is also held there and it takes over the town on the first week of July.
List of towns in the Republic of Ireland
