That effigy is long gone. What remains is a flat, undecorated tomb resembling an altar-tomb in form, and cut into its front panel is a Latin inscription added nearly two centuries after the man it commemorates had died. The inscription identifies this as the effigy of Cornelius O'Dea, and then quietly undermines itself: the body it describes was moved here in 1621, the carving was added in 1621, and whatever sculptural likeness once existed has since vanished entirely. It is, in other words, a monument to a monument.

Cornelius O'Dea served as Bishop of Limerick from 1400 to 1426, and the original graveslab dates to 1434. Nearly two hundred years later, on 14 July 1621, his remains were transferred to what the inscription calls a new burial place of the Bishops of Limerick, so that he might rest alongside his brethren. The Latin text records that the cost of this reinterment was borne by Donat, Earl of Thomond, described in the inscription as the most honourable Lord President of the Province of Munster. That figure is Donough O'Brien, fourth Earl of Thomond, a significant figure in early seventeenth-century Munster governance. The inscription was translated by the Reverend J. Dowd in his history of the cathedral, and the tomb is described in both FitzGerald's 1910 account and the Urban Survey of Limerick compiled by Bradley and colleagues in 1989. By FitzGerald's time, no trace of the bishop's effigy remained.

St. Mary's Cathedral is open to visitors and sits near the centre of Limerick's medieval core. The choir, where the slab sits on the south side, is accessible during normal opening hours. The monument is easy to overlook precisely because it is so plain; there is no figure, no decorative carving, nothing to catch the eye from a distance. Worth approaching closely enough to read the inscription panel, even without Latin, the dense capital lettering has a quiet formality to it. The slab is catalogued under the reference LI005-017015- in the national monument record, which gives some sense of how many layers of documentation have accumulated around something that is, physically, just a flat piece of limestone with a story carved into its face.