The inscription is direct, even blunt: "Pray for the soul of Fiaghy Burke and all his whole posterity, who directed this tomb in the year 1683." There is no elaborate heraldry recorded, no effigy, no lengthy Latin commendation. Just a name, a family, a date, and a request that assumes the reader will oblige.

The slab sits in Claregalway Friary, a Franciscan house in Baile Chláir, County Galway, and its position is telling. The chancel was the most liturgically significant part of a friary church, the space reserved for the friars themselves and their altar, and burial within it carried considerable prestige. The slab lies adjacent to the piscina and sedilia in the south wall; the piscina was a small stone basin used for rinsing sacred vessels, and the sedilia were the recessed seats where clergy rested during parts of the Mass. To be interred beside such fixtures was to be placed, quite literally, at the centre of the ritual life of the building. The slab itself is not especially large, measuring 1.19 metres in length and 0.97 metres in width, but its placement amplifies its significance. Fiaghy Burke, whoever he was among the many branches of that prominent Connacht family, clearly had the connections or the means to secure a privileged spot. The year 1683 places the commission well after the upheavals of the Cromwellian period, during which the friars had been displaced; the fact that a Burke was directing a tomb here at that date suggests a degree of renewed Catholic confidence in the locality, however fragile that confidence remained under the Penal conditions of the era.