Carolyn Swift's contributions to cultural life in Ireland lasted almost 60 years, and in the course of it she did frequently pioneering work in an astonishing range of cultural and artistic fields - although she herself could be almost dismissive of her achievements and more than once put them down to a "knack" for being in the right place at the right time.
These right places ranged from the drama department of the infant RTÉ television to the board of the Abbey Theatre, from launching (with her then-husband, Alan Simpson) the theatrical career of Brendan Behan to being in at the birth of the now-thriving Irish children's publishing industry in the early 1980s.
Brought into RTÉ by Hilton Edwards in 1961, she was closely involved with the early, brave days of Irish TV drama, although the television work closest to her heart (and to the hearts of a whole generation of Irish children) was her long association, as scriptwriter and series editor, with Wanderly Wagon. Memories of that show were almost as dear to Swift as memories of the time she and Simpson brought Beckett's Waiting For Godot on a tour of Irish provincial towns in 1956. Old scripts for the series stood proudly on her office shelf beside a folder of letters from Beckett himself, and the fact that she saw nothing odd in the juxtaposition is perhaps the best indication of how wide and inclusive her vision was.
Carol Samuel was born in London in 1923 to a strait-laced and successful Jewish family. Footloose and longing for adventure at the end of the second World War, she jumped at a job offer in Dublin from Anew McMaster, even then the grand old man of Irish theatre. It was while working for him at the Gate in 1947 that she met Alan Simpson, the man who would invent the professional name Carolyn Swift.
More importantly, he was the man she would marry and with whom she would go on to found in, 1953, the institution for which she will remain best known, the Pike Theatre.
In the eight years of its existence, the Pike introduced late-night satirical revue to a Dublin badly in need of it, discovered Behan, introduced Ireland to Beckett and staged European, English-language and world premieres of major works by playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre and Eugène Ionesco. It was the theatre's 1957 production of Williams's The Rose Tattoo, and the State's bizarre decision to prosecute Alan Simpson for staging it, which (in spite of Simpson's being cleared of all charges) effectively destroyed both the theatre and, ultimately, the Simpsons' marriage, and ensured that the Pike would go down in history for all the wrong reasons.
The true cause of the government's actions then was never revealed. Questions about the case - and casual misreporting of its details - were to plague Swift for the rest of her life. Following the release of a highly selective government file on the matter in 2000, she decided to hunt for the true story herself and spent the next two years researching a book on the controversy with Gerard Whelan. In recent months, as her health worsened, it had been increasingly a matter of hoping that she would live to see that book published. That she just about did so earlier this month was a matter of willpower as much as anything else.
A determined populist, Swift clung to the idea (never the most fashionable in Ireland) that the arts were not for any supposed elite, but for everyone. She was unfailingly kind and generous with her time to the beginner, the shy and the hesitant. A lousy self-publicist, she showed, in defence of people and causes she believed in, a formidable strength and persistence which she could not always apply to her own life.
At heart a decidedly shy woman, she was one of those people in whom small children instinctively recognise one of their own. Long an Irish citizen, she loved Ireland deeply, and (again unfashionably) that love was based firmly on the people of Ireland, warts and all. She was a good, true, thoughtful and loyal friend, with a strong sense of right and wrong, and without a single grain of cant in her entire body.
Carolyn Swift was in her time a journalist, author, actress, satirist, lyricist, theatre-owner, dramatist, radio broadcaster, reviewer of theatre, film and dance (for this paper), scriptwriter for stage, radio, film and historical pageant, and much, much more. No mere list of her writings could do justice to what she gave to the arts and their practitioners in Ireland.She was also a longtime member of the Labour Party and Amnesty International.
With her death is eclipsed a bottomless store of knowledge and anecdote about Irish cultural history and its most prominent players in her time, only a small part of which she recorded in print. She knew all of the greats of Irish culture in the latter half of the 20th century, and counted many of them as friends. She had walked with giants, and she was more than a bit of a giant herself.
She is survived by her daughters, Maureen and Deirdre, and by her granddaughter, Lena Cullen.
Carolyn Swift (Carol Samuel): born September 21st, 1923; died November 16th, 2002