Committee set up to celebrate the life of Dean Swift

An international committee has been set up to celebrate the life and work of Jonathan Swift, it was announced in Dublin yesterday.

The committee will advise the current Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, and successor to Swift, Very Rev Robert MacCarthy, "on ways of maintaining the present life of the cathedral and also to assist in maintaining the fabric of both the cathedral and the deanery", as the Dean said at St Patrick's yesterday.

He was speaking during the annual Swift commemoration service.

Among the international Swiftian scholars who will serve on the committee are Prof Robert Mahony of the Catholic University of America, Prof Alan Harrison and Prof Andrew Carpenter of UCD.

Mr Bruce Arnold, arts editor at the Irish Independent, and Prof Hermann Real, director of the Ehrenpreis Centre for Swift Studies at the University of Mⁿnster will also be on the committee.

During yesterday's service Prof Real said that up to the 20th century Swift had been seen as "a man of unclean mind, a blackguard, a faithless priest and perfidious lover, a cynic, moralist, and monstrous genius as well as a self-confessed misogynist and misanthrope". "Even now a myth persists about Swift's 'madness', as if no sane person could take such a dim view of human nature," he said, quoting from poet Derek Mahon's introduction to a selection of Swift's poems published just months ago.

But "the Dean never sat on the fence, he never watched ingloriously from the sidelines, and he was never afraid of a brush with any 'authority'.

"He was a man of tremendous courage, as honest as he was determined," he said.

He was "a man of volcanic temper, too, and he may have been inconsiderate, foolhardy, and reckless at times.

"But then, things do not change, and certainly do not change for the better, if you are apathetic, lethargic, and about as emotional as a bagpipe," Prof Real said.

As a satirist Swift saw it as his first and foremost business "to vex the world rather than to divert it" not so much to lash the vice, whether pride or ambition, but "to target proud and ambitious people".

He "simply saw no point in shrugging off sin personified." For him, "rather than exercise his pen in restraint, a satirist had to put his victims to shame, to ostracise them, to humiliate them in public.

"Only in this way could rampant evil . . . be effectively 'finished'."