Swift the prophet: a modest proposal for our times

AMUSING as it was to find a typical Swiftian nutshell encapsulating in a quatrain the perennial shenanigans of the builders opening Seamus McKenna’s analysis of what ails us (Letters, February 3), I think he does the good dean less than justice when he claims “he had less to say about economists, probably because Adam Smith had not yet invented that particular branch of study”.

Aside from the fact that Adam Smith no more invented the study of economics than Darwin “invented” evolution or its study, Mr McKenna seems to have overlooked Swift’s pamphleteering crusades against, among other things, the debasement of the currency and the manipulation of trade by the imperial economy of our neighbours over the puddle for their own advantage at considerable cost to the efforts of nascent Irish industry to compete on the tilted pitch.

But for depiction of the blinkered self-congratulatory tunnel vision of the econometric mentality behind the half-truths and self-delusion of laissez faire advocates, and the consequences of their logic driven to its inevitable conclusion in the epicurean cannibalism of a society consuming and marketing its own children to feed its overweening vanity, I have yet to encounter anything to match the great man’s Modest Proposal — six short pages of succinct vivisection of a self-serving parasitic class impervious in its luxury to the squalor and horror directly consequent to its ‘innocent’ actions.

And it seems modern Ireland, in its infatuation with the advertising man’s Celtic Pussycat, has managed to nourish itself into obesity on the backs once again of uncounted generations to come.

Perhaps these quieter times will give Mr McKenna a chance to enlarge his understanding of the prescience of this underestimated commentator on human folly that echoes far beyond the confinements of his own age. If our ‘leaders’ were better acquainted with his work they might not have rubbed all our noses quite so deep into the quick buck.

Mr McKenna’s presumption of authority on the basis of that dangerous thing, a little learning, equally mirrors the authoritarian prescriptions of our ‘betters’ down the ages to mistake superficially sophisticated savagery for civilisation.

Nor was Joyce’s “sow that ate her farrow” confined to the metaphorics of the arts, but in the interests of your spatial economics, I’ll leave that one in the sty.

Damien Flinter

Castleview Estate

Headford

Co Galway