Cracked in two and heavily weathered, it measures less than half a metre tall, yet it carries one of the more arresting inscriptions you are likely to encounter in an Irish medieval church. The opening lines, carved in Roman capitals, are a version of the memento mori formula known across medieval and early modern Europe: "Whoever you will be who shall pass by, stand, read, weep. I am what you will be, and I had been what you are." It is not a boast or a genealogical record. It is a direct address, written in the expectation that the reader would feel implicated.

The tablet commemorates Laurence O'Hehir of Dromkarhin, and was made, as the inscription states, for him and his descendants in the year 1621. That date places it in a period of considerable pressure on Franciscan communities in Ireland; Ennis Friary, founded in the thirteenth century by the O'Briens of Thomond, had endured suppression under the Elizabethan settlement, and the friars maintained a precarious presence in and around the buildings well into the seventeenth century. The choice of a friary church as the site for a family monument was not unusual among Gaelic and Old English Catholic families of the period, for whom such spaces carried devotional and social weight. The stone itself is fossiliferous limestone, meaning it contains the traces of ancient marine organisms within the rock, a material commonly quarried in County Clare. The Latin was recorded by the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp in the 1890s, and translated by Senan Hedderman of the Order of Friars Minor in 1991, by which point the stone had already suffered the fracture and erosion visible today.

The friary is open to visitors as a managed heritage site in Ennis town. The tablet sits in the north wall of the nave, and because it is broken and worn, it rewards close attention rather than a passing glance. The inscription, even in its damaged state, is largely legible if you take the time Laurence O'Hehir specifically requested.