Swift was enraged at the passivity of the Irish people, who had become so habituated to the situation that they seemed incapable of making any effort to change it. Irish manufacturies were deliberately crippled so that they could not compete with those in England. English absentee landlords owned most of the land which was worth owning. England controlled the Irish legislature. As a result Ireland was a desperately poor country, overpopulated, full, as Swift said, of beggars, wracked periodically by famine, heavily taxed, and with no say at all in its own affairs. It was manifestly in England's interest to keep things as they were: a weak Ireland could not threaten England, and the measures which kept it weak were profitable for the English.

He lived in an Ireland which was a colony, politically, militarily, and economically dependent upon England. Though he was most concerned with the plight of his own class, the relatively prosperous Anglo-Irish who were members of the Church of Ireland, rather than that of the Irish Presbytarians of Ulster or that of the Roman Catholics who made up the largest, and the poorest, segment of the Irish population, he spoke, in the end, for the country as a whole. He felt, for his own part, that he had been exiled to Ireland when he would have much preferred to have been in England, and his personal sense of the wrongs he had received at the hands of the English only intensified the anger he felt at the way England mistreated Ireland. Swift's motives for writing 'A Modest Proposal' ( text), which appeared in 1729, were complex.

A modest proposal 1729