An immodest proposal

WHEN a true genius arises in this world, Jonathan Swift said, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

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.

Why else, at a time when child obesity is a real problem and sports facilities are being swallowed up the gradual urban creep of towns everywhere — and consequent doom for the health services being predicted when the generation of Playstation addicts grow up — do you have a group of people campaigning against the provision of sports facilities.

Hence the nagging suspicion that this is some kind of terrific postmodern joke, a hoax being perpetrated by someone with an eye on pointing up the ridiculous obsessions of modern Ireland. God knows everyone is looking for their particular example of the madness of the Celtic tiger, and I doubt that even Swift’s savage indignation would have dreamed up a better example of the madness of the last decade.

You can imagine the next step in this brilliant scheme: a march by sick people protesting at the building of a new hospital, or a demonstration by prisoners in favour of more overcrowding in our jails.

Come on, it’s a brilliant idea. Confound people’s expectations, power to the people. It’s like the sixties all over again!

Apart from one little change. The erosion of one set of values – about community, about sport – seems here to be due to the swelling of another, altogether unrelated set of values.

House values, that is.

And here everyone frowns a little. Nobody has a sense of humour about the value of their house. Comedian Tommy Tiernan once drew fire for making fun of the crucifixion on the Late Late Show; if he really wanted to be brave he should have mocked the audience for what they paid for their houses. You’d have seen the switchboard light up pretty fast then.

Ahem. Back to Parteen. Without wishing to deny anyone the right to stand around a public thoroughfare and inconvenience 14-year-olds with hastily-painted placards, surely there are other, worthier protests people could engage in?

If a voluntary organisation is going to the trouble of providing facilities for the neighbourhood then where exactly is the problem?

Perhaps there are other issues at play here. Maybe the residents just don’t like bright lights in the sky. Maybe they’re GAA diehards unhappy with the prospect of the occasional game of five-a-side soccer in the Parteen GAA club. Maybe there are traffic access problems that need to be addressed.

But a word to the wise: even in Dean Swift’s time the way to win favour wasn’t by picking on kids. Nobody has a sense of humour about their mortgage, but a demonstration that zeroes in on preventing children from enjoying themselves doesn’t play well with any audience. In any century. Maybe this carry-on will stimulate the good folk of Parteen GAA club to contact a local builder about throwing up a few apartments on that proposed floodlit field.

And who’d look like a confederacy of dunces then?

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