It was placed there not simply to mark a death but to instruct the living, commanding them in turn to weep, to keep watch, and to pray. Few memorial tablets of this period are quite so direct about what they expect from their audience.

The plaque was commissioned by a William Dwyer, who identifies himself in the inscription as the son of the man buried beneath it, and who had it set in place on the second day of September 1635, over the remains of his parents and his predecessors. The Latin text, transcribed by the Reverend St John Seymour and published in FitzGerald's work of 1907 to 1909, opens with the words "Adjuva me Deus", meaning "Help me, O God", though a translation by White in 1892 renders the opening phrase as "Judge Me, O God". The inscription goes on to quote from scripture and from Catholic devotional tradition, reminding whoever reads it that death comes for every person once, that neither its day nor its hour is known, and that praying for the dead is, in its own words, "a holy and a wholesome thought". The closing "Requiescant" and the abbreviation I.H.S. place it firmly within the religious idiom of Counter-Reformation piety, making it a quietly unusual survival in what is now a Church of Ireland building.

The church itself sits at the western end of a long rectangular graveyard in Clonoulty Churchquarter, a graveyard that also contains the remains of a medieval church at its eastern end. The Dwyer plaque, then, occupies a site with several centuries of layered use, the O'Dwyer family inscription functioning as one thread in a longer story of burial and commemoration on the same ground.