Brian Merriman

Long after his death, Merriman's life drew wide attention after his single surviving work of substance was collected from the local oral tradition, written down, and published for the first time.

The poet versifies the self-justifying arguments and bottomless self-pity of the morally bankrupt lawyers for both genders, which are then answered by the judge's ruling that all laymen must marry before the age of 20 or face flogging at the hands of Ireland's understandably frustrated and outraged women.

[10] The family moved to Feakle,[11] where Merriman would have grown up travelling for illegal and secret religious worship to a Mass rock, which is still extant at the megalithic tomb in the nearby Ballycroum bog.

"[20] Even so, Corkery continues, the Irish-language poetry of the era, "is, contrariwise, a rich thing, a marvellous inheritance, bright with music, flushed with colour, deep with human feeling.

"[21] According to the local oral tradition, Brian Merriman was inspired to compose Cúirt an Mheán Oíche, just as the poem describes, by having a nightmare while sleeping along the shores of Loch Gréine.

[22] Like many other works of Munster Irish poetry from the same era, "The Midnight Court", according to Daniel Corkery, "almost two hundred years after its creation, has been found alive on the lips of fishermen and ditchers!

He wrote at a moment of national discouragement: the Penal Laws were still in force though weakening, the old order was a vivid memory, but, with the failure of the last Jacobite rising, hope of its return had vanished, and no new political dream had come.

According to the oral tradition, Merriman moved his family because he feared that his prosperous farm in Feakle might cause local men to kidnap his two beautiful daughters for the purposes of forced marriage.

In August 1992, a stone monument to Brian Merriman, with the opening lines of Cúirt an Mheán Oíche carved in Irish, was dedicated by Seamus Heaney and still stands overlooking the site of the 18th-century Bard's famous nap along the shores of Loch Gréine.

The giantess wakes up the poet, scolds him for sleeping in a ditch while court is in session, and drags him kicking and screaming into the presence of Aoibheal, the Queen of all the Fairies in County Clare.

She complains that despite increasingly desperate flirtation at hurling matches, wakes, and pattern days, the young men insist on ignoring her in favour of late marriages to richer, older, uglier, and often extremely shrewish women.

As a crowd of infuriated single women gleefully prepares to flog Brian Merriman into a quivering bowl of jelly, he awakens along the shore of Loch Gréine to find it was all a terrible nightmare.

Like the trial in Merriman's poem, a Munster Cúirt would begin with "bailiffs" delivering often humorously worded "warrants" which summoned local Irish-language poets to a Bardic competition presided over by the Chief-Bard as "judge".

According to Daniel Corkery, "The Aisling proper is Jacobite poetry; and a typical example would run something like this: The poet, weak with thinking of the woe that has overtaken the Gael, falls into a deep slumber.

Merriman's poem, for all its rhetorical and satirical extravagance, gives us a real sense of what life must have been like in 18th century Ireland: its people and their speech, their gestures, their dress, their food and drink, their recreations, and, of course, their sexual mores.

"[44] Ciarán Carson writes that the Old Man's praise of illegitimacy before the Court bolsters the oral tradition of County Clare, which alleges that Brian Merriman was born out of wedlock.

[45] While Yeats points out the plot similarities between The Midnight Court and Jonathan Swift's Cadenus and Vanessa,[46] he also expresses a belief that Merriman was mainly inspired by Irish folklore and mythology, particularly the love stories told about the demigods Cuchulain and Diarmuid Ua Duibhne and anti-Christian debate poetry such as the, "old dialogues where Oisín railed at Patrick."

Yeats argued that Merriman's poem may be considered, "more than the last song of Irish Paganism," but as similar to other works of religious satire from the so-called Age of Reason, including Robert Burns' Holy Willie's Prayer, Address to the Deil, and William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

To drive this point home, Mercier, drawing upon a 1913 article by literary scholar T. F. O'Rahilly, which cites many other works of both Irish bardic poetry and Seán nos songs whose narrators are every bit as bawdy, blasphemous, narcissistic, and seemingly nihilistic as the two lawyers and the judge in Merriman's poem.

"[51] Similarly to Piaras Beaslai, who had alleged in 1913, "Brian [Merriman] was essentially a moralist",[52] Vivian Mercier disagreed strongly with those who interpreted Cúirt an Mheán Oíche as a call for sexual revolution.

According to Mercier, Merriman was drawing upon a centuries-old tradition in Irish language satirical poetry, such as the hugely influential Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis and Egan O'Rahilly's Eachtra Thaidhg Dhuibhne Uí Chróinín; which were both composed as lampoons against the small minority of lower class Gaels who enriched themselves by converting to Puritanism and collaborating with the new elite against their own people during and after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.

Due to Merriman's mockery of a dystopian Ireland where the practice of Christian morality has been replaced by all of the Seven Deadly Sins, his satirical treatment of the battle of the sexes, and his devastating social commentary, Cúirt an Mheán Óiche is a truly unique work in the history of Irish poetry in either language.

Like much Irish and Scottish Gaelic oral poetry Cúirt an Mheán Oíche was preserved mainly by being memorized by successive generations of local seanchaithe although a manuscript of the poem written by Merriman himself does exist in Cambridge University Library.

The whole novel takes place during Irish neutrality in the Second World War and is written in the voices of the dead bodies buried in a rural Connemara cemetery, who remain conscious inside their coffins.

The dead proceed, however, to spend the whole novel viciously quarrelling with one another about past events in their lives and romantic relationships, about who was right and who was wrong during the Irish Civil War, and, most of all, about the social status or lack thereof of the speakers when they were still alive in their local parishes and villages.

The debate began when Professor James Hogan of the National University of Ireland claimed to have found, after reading Cúirt an Mheán Óiche in a literary translation into German, that O'Connor had introduced a blasphemous line that wasn't in the original text.

The alphabet soup of earlier Carson books such as First Language serves him well here with the alliterative riffing of the Gaelic metre (befuddled and boozed in a bibulous Babel)... For all its problems with the censor, Frank O'Connor's version is the drawing room performance; this one's for the shebeen in the wee small hours."

The people who attended the ceremony were almost all from the local district, and were eager to point out the exact corner of the nearby field where the poet had run his hedge school, and the spot on the lough shore where he had fallen asleep and had his vision.

Later that evening, for example, in a marquee a couple of miles down the road, we attended a performance by the Druid Theatre Company from Galway in which the poem was given a dramatic presentation with all the boost and blast-off that song and music and topical allusion could provide.

Again, hundreds of local people were in the tent, shouting and taking sides like a football crowd, as the old man and the young woman battled it out and the president of the court gave her judgement.