Bairbre Dowling (27 March 1953 – 20 January 2016) was an Irish actress.
She was born in Dublin as Barbara Patricia Dowling, the daughter of actor Vincent Dowling and actress Brenda Doyle, who died in a car crash in 1981. She had three sisters, Louise, Valerie and Rachel, and a step-brother, Cian. Between 1982 and 1994 she was married to actor Colm Meaney, with whom she had a daughter, Brenda, in 1984.
Dowling acted with her husband in the PBS television film Playboy of the Western World in 1983, in John Huston's 1987 film The Dead, and in the 1994 drama War of the Buttons.
In 1970 she was part of the company at the Abbey Theatre, where she appeared in The Becauseway (1970) and Rites (1973).
In 2011 she appeared in a play by Irish playwright Teresa Deevy, Temporal Powers; this was a Mint Theatre production presented as part of the Teresa Deevy project.