The man named is Johanes Eyre, and the building that bears his mark is the church at Eyrecourt, a settlement that took its very name from his family.

The inscription, recorded by O'Flanagan in 1927, reads in full: "Johanes Eyre de Eyr-court, Armiger proprys sumptibus, ad honorem cultumque divinum hanc edificavit ecclesiam, Anno Domini, 1677." The Latin translates roughly as: John Eyre of Eyrecourt, esquire, built this church at his own expense, for the honour and worship of God, in the year of the Lord 1677. The word Armiger, meaning one entitled to bear heraldic arms, places Eyre firmly within the Anglo-Irish gentry class that was consolidating its landholdings across Connacht in the decades following the Cromwellian settlements. That a man would commission not only a church but a permanent monument to his own founding role within it was not unusual for the period; what gives this inscription a particular quality is its directness. There is no intermediary piety, no long list of titles. Eyre states plainly that he paid for it himself and that he did so in God's honour. The demesne and village that grew around the church still carry his name, making the monument less an isolated object than the origin point of a place.