preside over sessions of a Cúirt, or Poetic Court. 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". In many cases, two Irish-language poets at the Cúirt would engage in Flyting; a mixture of debate poetry and the improvised trading of insults in verse, much like that between the two lawyers in Merriman's poem. Also according to Corkery, much of the serious, improvised, and comic poetry in the Irish-language composed for sessions of the Munster Poetic Courts was written down by the Court "Recorders" and still survives. Satire of Jacobite poetry The poem begins by using the conventions of the Jacobite Aisling, or Dream vision poem, in which the poet is out walking when he has a vision of a beautiful woman from the Otherworld. Typically, this woman is Ireland. She will lament her lot and/or call upon her 'sons' to rise up against both the anti-Catholicism and the tyranny of the Whig oligarchy. The woman will end by prophesying the return of religious toleration for Catholics and the dispossession of the Anglo-Irish landlords when the heir from the House of Stuart regains the British and Irish thrones. According to Ciarán Carson, "Merriman subverted all that. His fairy woman is not beautiful, but a threatening monster. The vision that she discloses is not of a future paradise, but a present reality. 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. The atmosphere of the 'court' is not so much that of a court of law, but of a country market, filled with verbal commotion and colour. For all that, it is still a dream-world, where Merriman can free himself from the restraints of conventional discourse, swooping from high rhetoric to street-talk in the space of a few lines – much as Dante did in the Inferno, which is also an aisling. And language is very much a concern of the aisling: a recurrent theme is the poet's lament for the decline of Irish, and its support mechanism of noble patronage." Satire of religion Ciarán Carson writes that the