The Irish denomination for Buttevant has reached such a degree of confusion as to make it almost unidentifiable. The oral tradition of the area consistently gives "Cill na Mullach", or 'Church of the Hillocks', for Buttevant. When the area was still largely Irish speaking, that tradition was recorded by O'Donovan in the field books of the General Survey of Valuation, Griffith's valuation, which was taken in the Barony of Orrery and Kilmore "ante" 1850. Peadar Ua Laoghaire confirms the tradition in his "Mo Scéal Féin". That notwithstanding, several other names have insistently been assigned to Buttevant by Irish Government officialdom: "Cill na mBeallach", "Cill na Mollach", and more recently "Cill na Mallach" by the Placenames Commission, explaining eruditely that it may signify "The Church of the Curse", for which, the general public can be excused for thinking the commission were referring to nearby "Killmallock". P.W. Joyce in his "The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places", published in Dublin in 1871, dismisses as erroneous and an invention of later times, the theory that the Irish name for Buttevant meant the Church of the Curse, and cites the Four Masters noting that a Franciscan Friary was founded at "Cill na Mullach" in 1251.