Carolyn Swift died on Saturday. A short while before her death, I had drafted a column about her for today. I have decided to let it stand as a reflection, perhaps, of the way the Irish State always seems to move too slowly and acknowledge the truth too late.
Carolyn Swift may not be with us much longer. She has been struggling with cancer for some and is now is a hospice. When she dies, there will be many tributes, some of them heartfelt and sincere, some full of platitudes. The tributes will refer to her many contributions to the arts in Ireland: her work as a script editor for RTÉ, her late blossoming as a children's author, her writing as dance critic of this newspaper.
Above all, however, the tributes will focus on the achievements that will always be linked to her name and to that of her then husband, Alan Simpson: the Pike Theatre of the 1950s. In the cold climate of John Charles McQuaid's Ireland, the Pike made a brave stand, not by deliberately taking on the authorities, but simply by acting as if Dublin was a normal, cosmopolitan city, full of intelligent and sophisticated people.
It presented the debut of Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow and most famously, one of the first English-language stagings of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot - now a revered classic, then a piece of far-out weirdness. It treated Beckett's European avant-garde as Irish, using Irish inflections in the actor's speech and suggesting through the set an Irish landscape of dark bog and gloomy sky.
This may seem like a small thing, but it was an act of real patriotism. To do something like this, you had to think highly of your compatriots, to believe that they were not the gobshites and gombeens that the church and the State assumed them to be when they denied them the right to read intelligent books or to see intelligent films.
The Dublin run of Waiting for Godot was, astonishingly, the longest continuous run in Irish theatre history up to that point. People responded to the fact that Carolyn Swift and Alan Simpson had paid them the compliment of treating them with respect. They took what would now be widely regarded as the most important play of the last 50 years to Dundalk and Navan, Carlow and Cork, Waterford and Clonmel, before it had even opened on Broadway. That, surely, was a harbinger of the slow emergence of a more confident society.
For its troubles, the Pike was crushed by the State. A few weeks ago New Island Press published Spiked: Church-State Intrigue and the Rose Tattoo by Carolyn Swift and Gerard Whelan. It is an extraordinary account of a story that many people think they know: the arrest of Alan Simpson for "producing for gain an indecent and profane performance". The performance in question is Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo, which is neither indecent nor profane.
In the folklore that often surrounds Irish social history, this episode has gone down as a bizarre, colourful and almost comical event - an emblem of how mad this poor country had become in the 1950s. Swift's and Whelan's book demolishes this notion.
The affair emerges as a sordid, nasty, cynical and cruel abuse of power, which had devastating human consequences for Swift and Simpson. Essentially, the Pike was unwittingly and unwillingly caught up in a set of manoeuvres in which the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, was trying to outflank John Charles McQuaid on another issue altogether, the Censorship of Publications Board. Simpson and Swift were simply picked up by the State, crumpled like pieces of used paper and tossed aside.
The ludicrous charges were eventually laughed out of court, but there was nothing funny about the consequences. These included public humiliation, well-grounded fear, social ostracism, bankruptcy and the collapse of their marriage under the strain of a year-long legal battle. The real crime, in other words, was the State and the real victims were two people whose only felony was the kind of positive, enthusiastic patriotism that made them think perhaps too highly of their country.
All of this, as I say, will be written about when Carolyn Swift dies. There will be much shaking of heads and muttering about the bad old days. Someone will probably get round to saying that it was a pity nothing was done to acknowledge the wrong while she was still alive.
In June 1958, when W.B. Stanford raised the issue in the Seanad, his question was ruled out of order because, as the Cathaoirleach put it, "this is a matter not suitable for discussion". Today, as I understand it, Michael D. Higgins will raise the matter in the Dáil, asking the Minister for Justice to acknowledge on the record the wrong that was done to Carolyn Swift, Alan Simpson and the Pike.
As well as this acknowledgment, there ought to be an apology and, just as importantly, an agreement to release the departmental files on the case which seem to have been withheld from the National Archives. A gracious response would allow Carolyn Swift to leave us in the knowledge that the hopes for a more civilised country for which she was punished in the 1950s were not mere delusions.