Wall monument, Clonroad Beg, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Religious Objects
Set into the northern wall of the nave at Ennis Friary, a limestone tablet carries a Latin inscription that manages, in a handful of words, to address everyone who will ever read it.
The tablet measures roughly half a metre tall and a metre wide, the lettering cut in incised Roman capitals, formal and deliberate. To the left of the text, a small ringed cross with expanded terminals is carved in false relief, the kind of decorative detail that grounds an otherwise stark memorial in the visual language of Irish Christian tradition. What makes the piece quietly arresting is not its size or its craftsmanship but its message, which steps past personal grief into something closer to a general statement about mortality.
The inscription commemorates Dermot Considine, recorded in the Latin form as Diermitius Mac Considin, who had the tablet made in 1631, for himself and his descendants. The Considines were a Clare family of some standing, and the choice of Ennis Friary as a burial location placed them within a Franciscan complex that had been one of the most significant religious sites in the county since its foundation in the thirteenth century. The Latin verses that follow the dedication are the monument's most unusual feature. Translated by Fr. Senan Hedderman O.F.M. in 1991, they read: "Death is common to all. Death no one spares. The honourable, the weak and the strong, all come to the obsequies of death." The sentiment is rooted in a long medieval tradition of memento mori, reminders of universal mortality that were common in ecclesiastical settings across Europe, though it is striking to find the formula expressed so plainly and directly in a provincial Irish friary in the early seventeenth century, a period of considerable upheaval for Franciscan communities under English colonial rule.
Ennis Friary is accessible in the town centre of Ennis and is managed as a national monument, open to visitors during the summer season. The wall monument sits in the nave, and the incised lettering reads clearly despite its age, making it one of the more legible inscriptions in the friary's collection of medieval and early modern stonework.