Rathkeale was the home of the famous tenor, christopher lynch who was born in church street his house is located at the top of church street, a plaque was erected to his memory in 2010
brendan markham lead singer of 1990s rock band ,the driven is a rathkeale man
rathkeale is unique because half of its population are members of the travelling community
Sean finn the famous oc of the IRA west limerick brigade during the war of independence was a native of rathkeale,his grave is located in the local graveyard adjoining st marys church
Rathkeales former railway station is now home to the palatine museam
Castlematrix gets its name from the original Lords of Rathkeale. The Manor of Rathkeale was centred on the townlands of Castlematrix and Courtmatrix. Both townlands were the centre of earlier settlements. Castlematrix is recorded in the 1640s as containing a small village along with a mill. However, the inhabitants of the village were probably cleared at a later date by a member of the Southwell family, and probably these people were to be the original inhabitants of Church Street, the only street in Rathkeale to be part of the Southwell estate. The remainder of the town had the Abbey as the focus of its development. This is clear from the Peyton Survey of 1588, which shows the lands of the Abbey to be the centre for the annual market and records the presence of buildings which could be rented as 'shops' in this area. The Civil Survey in 1654 and the 1659 Census provide us with a picture of a town stretching from the Abbey towards the Deel Bridge, containing over 600 inhabitants, where most of the property owners were old English. This implies that, contrary to McCarthy-Murrough's opinion, Rathkeale was not in fact a plantation town but had much older roots and far more substantial than people thought (Kilmallock about this time with possibly 3,000 inhabitants was almost certainly the largest inland town in the county and among the five largest in the country as a whole). Rathkeale would have been second only to Kilmallock in Co. Limerick.
