Beneath the surface of a quiet corner of Naas, seven people were waiting to be found. In 1995, groundwork ahead of a small private development turned up their skeletal remains, lying roughly thirty metres east of where a Dominican friary is thought to have stood in the seventeenth century. The burials were interpreted as belonging to a graveyard associated with that friary, meaning that what looked like an unremarkable plot of town ground had, for centuries, been quietly holding the dead of a religious community.

The Dominican order established friaries across medieval and early modern Ireland, and such houses typically maintained their own burial grounds for friars and, in many cases, for lay benefactors and local people. The friary at Naas is described only as a possible seventeenth-century foundation, which places it in a period of considerable disruption for Catholic religious communities in Ireland, when the Reformation and its aftermath forced many orders to operate with minimal formal infrastructure. The discovery of the associated graveyard, fragmented and largely unrecorded until that 1995 excavation, fits the pattern of sites that were abandoned or suppressed and then gradually absorbed into the fabric of the expanding town. Further monitoring of telecommunications trenching along Abbey Street, which runs along the eastern edge of the site, recovered the redeposited and disarticulated remains of two adult females, bones that had been disturbed and moved from their original positions, most likely by earlier ground disturbance of the kind that tends to accumulate invisibly beneath busy urban streets.