Brian Merriman or in Irish Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre was an 18th-century Irish language bard, farmer, hedge school teacher, and Irish traditional musician from rural County Clare.

The aisling, or vision poem, is a Mythopoeic poetic genre that developed during the late 17th and 18th centuries in Irish language poetry. The word may have a number of variations in pronunciation, but the is of the first syllable is always realised as a ("sh") sound.