The niches themselves are labelled, which only underscores the awkwardness: the labels remain in the right places, while at least some of the saints do not.

The panel is a side piece belonging to a chest tomb, the kind of free-standing rectangular monument common in late medieval Irish ecclesiastical settings, typically decorated on its flanks with carved saints, apostles, or weepers. This particular example dates from the first half of the sixteenth century and is associated with the Butler effigial tomb nearby, the Butlers being one of the most powerful Anglo-Norman dynasties in Munster. Writing in 1974, the art historian John Hunt described the panel as consisting of five or six saints arranged in niches with foliated spandrels, the decorative leaf-work filling the curved spaces between the arches, with buttress-like divisions separating each figure. Hunt noted that the carving is hard and angular in character, a style not uncommon in Irish tomb sculpture of this period, and that among the identifiable figures are St Paul, shown with his traditional attribute of a sword, and St Simon. The remaining three or four figures are, in Hunt's words, arbitrarily assembled, meaning they have been put back in no reliably correct order, their original sequence lost to time and misguided restoration.