The importance of Jonathan Swift for English literature depends on his uniquely strenuous and brilliant form of political satire - an amalgam of conservative passion for the illusive rectitude of a just monarchy and true religion. His importance in Irish writing is more connected with his supposed role as the father of Irish nationalism - a highly disputable conception, given his strongly Protestant (and, more specifically, Anglican) attachments and his intense devotion to the idea of monarchy.
 In addition, he was in his own estimate an Englishman through and through and only grumbled at the bitter fact that, once removed to Ireland, as settlers and colonists, the Anglo-Irish were no longer treated by their erstwhile compatriots as full members of the same nation.
 Looking around him at those with whom he shared the island of Ireland, Presbyterians in the North and Catholics throughout - Swift was affected by the siege mentality which characterises the Anglo-Irish in varying degrees in every generation. At the same time he was capable of feeling the true horror of the condition to which the native Irish had been reduced by English misgovernment and to that extent he displayed, in A Modest Proposal, a political affinity with them.
 Swift's cultural indebtedness to Ireland - where he was born and where he was educated, and where he finally came to live the greater part of his adult life after his appointment to the Deanship of St. Patrick's Cathedral (Dublin) - was not very marked indeed. He did not know, and actively disliked, the Irish language, which he regarded as a badge of inferiority and which he sought to see uprooted. (His translation of the “Pléaráca na Ruarcach” of Hugh MacGauran is the nearest thing to an direct borrowing from the Irish language.
 At the same time it is possible to speak of a deep and diffuse influence in the sense that Ireland and its predicament as a decentred culture informs his satirical art at every point and gives it its curious instablility - the upsetting quality that prevents the reader from finding any resting-place for his conscience.
 Indeed, Swift had the idea that happiness was not only an unlikely possession but, in essence, a duplicitious one which could only be attained by an enormous act of self-deception. Life is, first and foremost, a tragedy and a disaster. He gave expression to this idea quite brilliantly in his diatribe against the experimental scientists in A Tale of A Tub - the seemingly cynical satire that lost him the support of Queen Anne and hence any chance of professional perferment.
 Writing of all “enthusiasts” - by which he meant Presbyterians and scientists alike - Swift wrote:

 Having set up this idea, he goes about proving it in a typically heartless passage purporting to be the report of a gentleman about a surgical demonstration of the kind that many of the intelligentsia of the period would occasionally visit in the dissection rooms of the leading anatomists:

And if it now sounds as though the reader has been led to understand that scientific (like global) exploration is inherently a bad thing because it disturbs the surface contentment of the social animal, Swift ends with a piece of sheer treachery, impaling writer and reader on a false supposition:

 So, then, he who allows himself to rest easy with a knowledge of the surface and to seek no further than the apparent virtue of contemporary arrangements is finally condemned as the victim of deceivers and himself, in short, “a fool among knaves”. Hence “felicity” (or happiness) and deception are essentially the same thing.
 This is a species of satire which does not merely eviscerate its enemies, it also destroys the basis of its own superiority leaving no place where the mind can find release from the sheer awfulness of the human condition which it painfully describes.
 There is nothing in Irish culture before Swift - other than the awful things that happened in Ireland in the course of the conquest and the establishment of the Anglo-Irish colony of which Swift is inevitably (and, it might be said, with inextricable irony) a part - which provides a model for this kind of writing, though some have suggested that the use of curses and diatribe in bardic writing suggests something of a model.
 However, when we think of the quality of Swift's imagination and in particular the scenarios which he created in Gulliver's Travels, there is room for the thesis that he was in touch with the fantastical in Irish narrative, whether by means of oral transmission or through a general participation in the imaginative climate of Irish culture all around him. For instance: did Swfit known anything of the Irish narrative genre known as the immrama or voyage-poem, in which a character travels to magical realms and returns to narrate what he has seen?
 Tenuous as this parallel may seem, it does gives grounds for considering that perhaps the strange islands that Gulliver visits have less to do with reports of wondrous lands coming back from English sailors in the first age of imperial expansion than with the Irish legend of Osin in Tír na nOg - the Land of the Eternal Youth. Likewise the people of Lagado in Swift's narrative enjoy the desirable condition of immortality, as a result of which they suffer horribly from the diseases of old age in perpetuum in typically Swiftian fashion.
 When it comes to the general form of the Travels it is worth remembering the jibe recorded by Boswell in the Life of Dr. Johnston: “When once you have thought of big men, it is very easy to do all the rest”. That may be, but it is not easy to thing of big men and little men unless one has heard the tales of Finn Mac Cool with their monstrous exaggeration of the physical scale and prowess of the heroes of ancient Ireland.
 Swift was an Englishman in Ireland, but he was also in his parentage and upbringing an Anglo-Irishman and therefore a member of a class whose identity and consciousness was shape to a greater or lesser extent by the problematic hyphen in that term. Between Ireland and England there began to be a thin channel of communication (as distinct from the thin edge of the colonists sword) and through this channel forms of imagination originally Irish seeped into English literature.
 Jonathan Swift is the foremost of the English satirists and the greatest of the English misanthropists - faithful to the sense of the Latin epitaph - which now stands on a wall in St. Patrick’s Cathedral - bearing out the sense of his own epitaph which W. B. Yeats translated in these words:

For the man who gave us the sentence and the idea that “government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery” it is a just homage. The difficulty is, perhaps, that applying it to the British dominant of Ireland (and Jonathan Swift's clerical part in it) is no easy matter and ultimately it was better suited to the rebellious leaders of the American War of Independence than to the majority of Swift’s contemporaries in Ireland. I leave it to you to reason what it means today.