Brian Merriman

Brian Merriman or in Irish Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre (c. 1747 – 27 July 1805) was an Irish language poet and teacher. His single surviving work of substance, the 1000-line long Cúirt An Mheán Oíche (The Midnight Court) is widely regarded as the greatest comic poem in the history of Irish literature.

Merriman in an oral account collected after his death was said to have been born illegitimately in Clondagad or Ennistymon, County Clare. His mother was surnamed Quilkeen and his father's identity remains unknown.

Shortly after his birth, his mother married a stonemason who was working on the walls of the Deerpark estate in Ennistymon. The family moved to Feakle and some years later Merriman is known to have owned a 20-acre (81,000 m²) farm near Loch Gréine. He was a teacher of mathematics and is known to have taught the hedge school nearby in the townland of Kilclaren. He married around 1787 and had two daughters. In 1797, the Royal Dublin Society awarded him two prizes for his flax crop. Around 1800 he moved to County Limerick, where he ran a school until his death. He is buried in Fiacla graveyard.

The poem begins by using the conventions of the Aisling, or vision poem, in which the poet is out walking when he has a vision of a woman from the other world. Typically, this woman is Ireland and the poem will lament her lot and/or call on her 'sons' to rebel against foreign tyranny. In Merriman's hands, the convention is made to take a satirical and deeply ironic twist.

In the opening section of the poem, a hideous female giant appears to the poet and drags him kicking and screaming to the court of Queen Aoibheal of the Fairies. On the way to the ruined monastery at Moinmoy, the messenger explains that the Queen, disgusted by the twin corruptions of Anglo-Irish landlords and English Law, has taken the dispensing of justice upon herself. There follows a traditional court case under the Brehon law form of a three-part debate.

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