An immodest proposal
The revered Dean Swift has been much on the mind these last couple of days, particularly since we received this week’s sign of the apocalypse from county Clare. Spectators and players attending a midweek U14 game at the Parteen GAA club had to disembark from their cars a few hundred yards away from the pitch itself due to a protest by local residents at the club entrance. The focal point of the protest seems to be the club’s plan to build a floodlit facility consisting of an all-weather pitch and ball alley.
Cultured reader, you may remember that beyond Gulliver’s Travels, Swift was also author of “A Modest Proposal”, a short work in which he proposed that the poor people of Ireland stave off starvation by eating their own children. Surely this is the only way to view recent events in Clare — as the wild invention of a latter-day Swift.
