Swift traces the link between suffering and greed in this essay. He achieves this through an ironic framing of his clueless narrator, who is indifferent to the suffering of the poor. To him, they are merely a problem for the well-to-do. The Irish poor are starving, unemployed, and desperate, with almost no hope of a better situation. The narrator, for whom morals are subordinate to economic calculations, highlights the plight of the poor, because, to his mind, it buttresses his case for cannibalism. The descriptions of poor people’s sufferings are also an important part of Swift’s broader thesis: he wants readers to know how the Irish poor are suffering and not to have these facts downplayed.

The narrator explicitly connects Irish poverty to the actions of the rich. He states that the children of the poor, if they became a salable commodity, could be used as collateral against debt and taken by landlords as repayment; the landlords have already “seized” all the cattle and crops of the poor. The narrator comments that landlords have not “one degree of mercy towards their tenants.” The narrator makes a statement that from his point of view is sincere. He suggests that the price of the children to eaten will be expensive (“dear”) but is

therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.

Swift makes it clear that if the landlords had been less greedy, the poor would not be suffering so completely as they do. Thus the problem of poverty in Ireland is not the fault of the poor, but of the rich, who have for too long extracted too much from subjects with no power to fight back.