But fixed quietly into the western wall of the south transept, directly above the entrance to one of those vaults, is a stone monument that most visitors walk past without pausing. It bears a coat of arms and an incised Latin inscription, the lettering cut directly into the surface of the stone rather than raised in relief, giving it a restrained, almost private quality at odds with the more theatrical aspects of the building around it.

The monument commemorates Richard Tighe and is dated 1673, placing it in the decades following the Cromwellian period, when Protestant families were consolidating land and civic influence across Ireland and memorial culture in churches reflected that ambition. A wall monument of this kind, set into the fabric of a church above the entrance to a family vault, served a dual purpose: it marked a burial place and publicly declared lineage through heraldry. The coat of arms here would have been immediately legible to contemporaries in a way that a modern viewer might need to work at. The record of the monument appears in volume six of the "Memorials of the Dead" series, published between 1904 and 1906, which catalogued inscriptions and funerary monuments across Ireland at a time when many were already at risk of being lost or damaged. The monument was compiled into the national record by Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the database in August 2012.

St Michan's is an active Church of Ireland parish and opens to visitors on a guided basis, with tours focused primarily on the vaults below. The wall monument in the south transept receives considerably less attention than the mummified remains downstairs, which means it is possible to look at it in relative quiet. The incised Latin inscription rewards a close look; the cutting of individual letters into stone rather than casting them in plaster or metal gives the surface a directness that later memorial fashions moved away from. The church is on Church Street in north Dublin city, a short walk from the Four Courts.