The friary church still stands to a considerable height, its Gothic windows intact enough to give a clear sense of what the interior once looked like, and the overall fabric of the complex speaks to a community that was both well-funded and deeply embedded in the life of the town.

The friary was founded in 1241 by Meiler de Bermingham, the Anglo-Norman lord who also founded the town itself, making it one of the earliest Franciscan houses in Connacht. The Franciscans, a mendicant order founded by Francis of Assisi in the early thirteenth century, were unusual in that they were explicitly committed to poverty and relied on the surrounding community for support, which made their houses natural focal points in developing urban settlements. At Athenry, that relationship with the de Bermingham family and later with other Connacht nobility ran deep. The friary served as a burial place for several prominent families, and it continued to function, despite repeated disruption, well into the sixteenth century. The Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII brought the formal suppression of the house, though the Franciscans maintained some presence in the area long afterwards, as they did in many parts of Connacht where the Reformation took only shallow root.