Swift

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was born at 7 Hoey's Court, Dublin, on the thirtieth of November 1667, seven months after his father's death, schooled at Kilkenny College and Trinity College Dublin, took priest's orders in the Church of Ireland in 1694, served as secretary to Sir William Temple at Moor Park in Surrey 1689–99, and was appointed Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin in 1713, a post he held for the remaining thirty-two years of his life. He was the English-language satirist of the early eighteenth century: A Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver's Travels (1726), A Modest Proposal (1729), the Drapier's Letters (1724), and a body of poetry that included Cadenus and Vanessa (1726) and the late-period Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1731).

The Drapier's Letters (1724), seven pamphlets published anonymously in Dublin between March and December 1724 under the pseudonym M. B. Drapier, attacked the patent granted to William Wood for the minting of copper half-pennies for circulation in Ireland and so successfully mobilised Irish public opinion that the patent was withdrawn by the British government in 1725. The Drapier's Letters are, by every careful Irish-political historian, the founding text of modern Irish political journalism. The reward of three hundred pounds offered by Lord Lieutenant Carteret for the Drapier's identity was, by the tradition, never claimed by any printer or person in Dublin who knew it; the convention of the Dublin print trade held until Swift's death in 1745.

Swift died on the nineteenth of October 1745 at the Deanery of St Patrick's, seventy-seven years old, after a long decline of senility and depressive illness. He left his estate to found St Patrick's Hospital for the mentally ill, the first specialist mental hospital in Ireland, which opened in 1757 and continues today. He is buried in St Patrick's Cathedral, ten yards from the high altar, under his own Latin epitaph: Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit, where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart.