It is a very melancholy reflection, that such a country as ours, which is capable of producing all things necessary, and most things convenient for life, sufficient for the support of four times the number of its inhabitants, should yet lie under the heaviest load of misery and want, our streets crowded with beggars, so many of our lower sort of tradesmen, labourers, and artificers, not able to find clothes and food for their families.6
The opening paragraph of this sermon seems to be subverted in the opening paragraph of A Modest Proposal. It begins almost the same way (‘It is a melancholy object to those …’) but instead of workers unable to provide for themselves we are told about female beggars followed by their children in rags, destined to become thieves or sell themselves to Barbados. A Modest Proposal was close in content and argument but often only slightly more sardonic in tone than the bitter unpublished writings, serious polemics and sermons he wrote during the 1720s on the condition of Ireland. Across these, the same voice, the same arguments and the same obsessions are readily discernible. As such A Modest Proposal cannot be understood in isolation.
In The Battle of the Books (1704) Swift described satire ‘as a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally observe everybody’s face but their own’, which was the chief reason why so few were offended by it. A Modest Proposal was not just the palatable and humorous expression of Swift’s frustration but a satire on the impossibility of schemes of improvement proposed by others and a mirror held up to his own face that mocked the Protestant patriot case for economic autonomy and constitutional reform he earnestly advanced. For making this case he came to be celebrated by subsequent generations of patriots and nationalists as varied as Henry Grattan, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis and John Mitchel. In 1847, Mitchel edited a pamphlet on behalf of the Irish Confederation entitled Irish Political Economy that republished Swift’s A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture and pressed it into the service of a new separatist ideal.
Swift viewed himself as exiled from England and as having to cast his lot with the Irish. The manner in which he did so and the genius with which he expressed his own and Ireland’s predicaments canonised him for generations as a model patriot and as the architect of Anglo-Irish identity. But Swift’s relationship with Ireland remained ambivalent. As put in a 1727 poem, written at the port of Holyhead, awaiting passage to the land of his birth:
Remove me from this land of slaves,
Where all are fools and all are knaves,
Where every knave and fool is bought,
Yet kindly sells himself for nought…
BF
Notes
1Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for making them beneficial to the Publick (Dublin, 1729).
2Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture in Cloaths and Furniture of Houses, & c. Utterly Rejecting and Renouncing Every Thing wearable that comes from England (Dublin, 1720).
3Jonathan Swift, An Answer to Several Letters sent to me from Unknown Hands (Dublin, 1729).
4Jonathan Swift, Answer to Several Letters from Unknown Persons (1729) (first published, London: William Johnston, 1765).
5Jonathan Swift, A Sermon on the Causes of the Wretched Conditions of Ireland in The Sermons of Rev Dr Jonathan Swift (Glasgow: Urie, 1763).
6Jonathan Swift, The Truth of Some Maxims in State and Government examined with reference to Ireland (Dublin, 1729).
5
Andrew Dunleavy, The Catechism of Christian Doctrine (1742)
Long before the invention of PowerPoint and frequently asked questions on websites, Catholics were instructed in their faith by means of question and answer booklets setting out Church doctrine. The standard reference for pre-Vatican II catechesis (religious instruction given in advance of baptism or confirmation) was the Catechism of the Council of Trent, 1566, also known as the Roman Catechism. This emerged in response to catechisms devised by Lutherans. Printing had made the Reformation possible by making Scripture available to literate laypeople. Protestantism emphasised the primacy of the Bible and its unmediated study by the faithful, Catholicism the primacy of doctrinal interpretations of Scripture by the priesthood. In the centuries since, the Reformation printed Catechisms tailored in different editions for children and the general population; these so-called Penny Catechisms were far more influential than the Bible in shaping Irish Catholicism.
The Penny Catechisms were derived from longer ones designed for the education of priests. An early Irish example, The Catholic Christian Doctrine for the use of pastors and Catechesis in order to instruct Children and Illiterate Persons, attributed to Rev. F.W. Devereux of the Diocese of Ferns, drew on the text of the Douay Catechism, published in Rheims in France in 1648, the town where the standard Catholic English-language Bible was first printed. Both answered similarly a question about how children, the old, blind people and the lame would be represented on Judgement Day. All would be restored as if they had reached the perfect age of thirty-three years , because that was reportedly the age at which the saviour died.
One authored during the 1770s by James Butler, Archbishop of Cashel, remained in print into the twentieth century. A 1922 Butler catechism published in Waterford was described on the front cover as ‘Revised, Enlarged, Approved and Recommended by the Four R.C. Archbishops of Ireland.’ The earliest full-length catechism to be published in both English and Irish was composed by Andrew Dunleavy (or Donleavy) in the early 1740s. Dunleavy was Director of the Irish College at the time. He had grown up in Sligo under the Penal Laws but escaped to France in 1710 to study for the priesthood. His catechism appeared in both Irish (Gaelic) and English: The Catechism of Christian Doctrine by way of Question and Answer Drawn Chiefly From The Express Word of God and Other Pure Sources. It was published in its third edition for the Royal Catholic College of St Patrick, Maynooth in 1848 after which it was adopted by a number of dioceses. An early edition was accompanied by a 1741 testimonial to its excellence by Michael O’Gara, Archbishop of Tuam. A near-copy of the Dunleavy Catechism attributed to Michael O’Reilly, who became Archbishop of Armagh in 1749, remained in use in Derry well into the twentieth century. 1
Dunleavy set out his text in both languages on facing pages and the 1848 Maynooth edition included an appendix that explained the spelling, typeface and pronunciation of the Gaelic alphabet. It also reproduced Dunleavy’s original 1742 foreword which argued that children’s catechisms were inadequate for the spiritual education of lay adults. Dunleavy explained that his work had been prompted by the great scarcity of full catechisms in Ireland. Unlike many other catechisms which began with the question, ‘Who made the world?’ Dunleavy’s first question was, ‘What is the Catechism?’ He defined it as ‘a plain and intelligible explanation of the Articles of the Christian Faith necessary for salvation; and of other points belonging to the service of God’.
Unlike subsequent abbreviated Penny Catechisms, Dunleavy cited specific passages from Scripture in support of
