Press Releases28 Nov 17

“If level of homeless children is ‘normal’ then this normality is wrong”

Fintan O’Toole addresses Swift 350 Evensong

The power of Jonathan Swift’s moral outrage and his stature as a literary figure were commemorated at a special Service of Choral Evensong in St Patrick’s Cathedral on Sunday afternoon (November 26). The 350th anniversary of Swift’s birth falls on November 30 and the service, which was sung by the Cathedral Choir, was addressed by Irish Times journalist and columnist Fintan O’Toole. Swift was Dean of St Patrick’s from 1713 to 1745 and the service took place towards the end of the first ever Jonathan Swift Festival.

Mr O’Toole described Swift as the founding father of the use of English as a literary language in Ireland. Ireland is known throughout the world for its use of the English language and Swift was the first person to enable the use of the language in this way, he said.

He said Swift’s moral power was awkward and oppositional, a fact underwritten by how quickly ranks closed behind him following his death. There was a kind of glee in presenting him as a madman and this hatred should remind us of how powerful a figure he was, Mr O’Toole stated.

Swift suffered from Meniere’s disease, a disorder of the middle ear, and the speaker pointed to parallels to this in his writing – multiple voices and shifts in perspective make us dizzy and his rage at human degradation makes us nauseous.

Against his assault, the only defence was that he was mad or degenerate, Mr O’Toole stated. He said there was something wrong with Swift. He lacked the protective shell, the thick skin, which would have stopped him seeing what was around him – the poverty and human degradation. He saw the self–delusion that allowed the celebration of violence. “What was wrong with him was that he wasn’t able to play along,” he explained.

In his writing, Swift forces us to engage with two things, Mr O’Toole contended: perspective and the limit of reason. Swift turns the reader’s sense of perspective on its head. He overturns the “smug orthodoxies” of imperial culture. “This playing with perspective is not just a literary device. It has a moral purpose. If we experience shifts in perspective while reading a book we should be capable of experiencing it in our daily lives … to be able to view the world from someone else’s point of view. Swift is a proud man but at the core of his work is the humility to be able to plead with us to be humble enough to recognise the limits of our own perspective. This is a moral call for this world. If we can see the world from another’s perspective, we are unlikely to kill them for having a different point of view,” he said.

Mr O’Toole suggested that, in a way, Swift was driven to the edge of reason but he was also trying to make us understand something about our human capacity to reason. “He tells us that reason is useless without indignation, passion and compassion … Swift’s insistence that reason becomes dangerous if we don’t root it in morality should live with us today,” he said.

On Swift’s anniversary, the speaker said it was timely to look at his city and the more than 2,000 children who wake up homeless in Dublin every day. He said recent political discourse suggested that this was a reasonable figure – the reasonable result of the housing crisis. “What Swift would say is that if it is normal and reasonable that 2,000 children wake up homeless in Dublin every day, then this normality is wrong. We must allow ourselves to be outraged … we can’t allow constricted views of reason,” he stated.