The problem is that nobody is quite certain it ever was one. The attribution to the Augustinian friars sits uneasily alongside the physical and documentary evidence, which points more confidently towards an ordinary parish church than a friary.

What can be said with reasonable confidence is that Clonmeen functioned as a parish church from at least the fifteenth century. The surviving western gable, which is the fragment most associated with the supposed monastic identity of the site, is catalogued together with the church remains rather than treated as a separate religious house in its own right. The Augustinian connection may have grown from local tradition or from a too-hasty reading of the map annotation, and the evidence, as it stands, remains ambiguous. Augustinian friaries were established across Munster during the medieval period, often in small rural settlements, so the idea is not implausible on historical grounds, but plausibility is not the same as proof.