Displaced in Mullingar:What would Jonathan Swift make of the frenzied, sweaty yahoos in the swinging local nightclubs, asks Michael Harding

I find it impossible to read Samuel Beckett without having one eye firmly on the writings of Jonathan Swift. And at the end of his life Swift seemed almost like a character Beckett might have invented.

I had an uncle who loved the writings of Swift, and when he died I inherited his coat. It was a well-tailored woollen coat, and I wondered for a long time what to do with it.

Then, one winter's night, the ghost of Swift sat down at my side, and wouldn't let me go until I made the coat into something useful. So I found a designer who converted my uncle's coat into the kind of jacket Swift might have worn in his day, and with the help of a theatre director, I made a play.

I began performing Doctor Swift, as he might have appeared in his later life. I went up and down the country with a one-man show - Talking Through His Hat.

But I wasn't talking through my hat. I was only imitating the ghost at my shoulder; that old despairing cleric, repugnantly masculine, who haunted me each day, and slept, in my wardrobe, at night.

Irish men in every century have been a disappointment to Irish women.

The real anthem of the Irish nation is a forlorn whinge of dissatisfaction and complaint, in the tradition of banshee and keener, and the ladies of the Midnight Court.

In modern Ireland, where women continue to offer substantial evidence of their disappointment with men, Swift seems ugly, misogynistic, unloving and unlovable. He is everything that is politically incorrect in modern Ireland, where young people are encouraged to study U2 lyrics rather than his bracing prose.

When I moved to Mullingar last year, the ghost of Swift followed me, and when I drank alone in public houses, the hoary old ghost often came up behind me and sat on a bar stool beside me.

And sometimes I worried what might happen if the old rascal from the 18th century was really let loose for a night in one of Mullingar's swinging nightclubs, where girls fling themselves into erotic frenzies and lathers of sweat until the break of day.

To see Jonathan Swift wandering onto the floor of a discotheque was a disturbing experience; especially when he approached some lady fair of lily hue, pale and blushing by the bar.

Would he woo her, or win her, with his airs and graces? His armpits well besmeared with months of sweat. Rubbing his wrinkles with an oily forehead cloth.

Of course he wouldn't win anyone! He was just an old man, spitting and spewing with excitement. His face a nasty compound of all hues, blue and purple, pink and white. While the beautiful girl danced upon the disco floor.

And like a great rhinoceros he bellowed out his vowels above the music.

"Anything my dearie, my lily, poopie-doopie, dolly-wolly, for a lock of your hair!"

I thought I saw him cast his handkerchief at her feet! And feared that it might turn her bowels, when she sniffed the snuff in his snotty towel! I saw him at the bar, distressed, his nose itching from rejection, and a nasty blackhead. And I saw him faithfully directing his nails, to squeeze it out from head to tail.

That was the Swift who haunted me, a funny unlovable beast. Though there were darker moments when I went home alone.

And he was a bundle of remorse, when all the pretty girls had rejected him, and passed him by, and dismissed him as just a bad-smelling old man at the bar, with yellow stains upon his breeches.

In the bedroom he stood in the corner, and fixed me with his stare, and spoke at last.

"I have lost my teeth and hair," he said. "I feel I am alone and that I ought to die. I have no distinction of taste but eat and drink what ever is given me.

"And when I look upon other old people I consider it the most mortifying sight I have ever beheld."

Thus was I haunted for five years. The old man never left my side, as long as I continued doing the one-man show.

And then recently I performed Swift for one final time, in the Courthouse Arts Centre in Tinahealy. I folded away my uncle's coat in the dressing room for the last time; and the good doctor shook my hand and walked away into the night.