Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)

told me to come down for my tea. Down I came and she had made me a big feed of
rashers [Francie imagines them to be eating bacon] and eggs and tea the whole
lot... I felt good about all this. (63-4)

Francie even expresses an awareness an awarness of his own wish to be a Nugent by

imagining Philip to be accusing him of wanting "to be one of us. He wants his name
to be Francis Nugent. That's what he's wanted all along!" (64). In another
hallucianation Francie fantasizes that Mr Nugent accuses him of having asked Mrs
Nugent "to be his mother" and of giving "anything not to be a pig" (97). All of
this indirectly leads to Franci� murder of Mr Nugent. As Elizabeth Butler
Cullingford argues, "Mrs Nugent's kind of mothering" stands "as a reproach to the
fragile capacities of Mrs. Brady," and Francie kills her "partly as a way of
affirming his family loyalty."57 Francie's murder of Mrs Nugent, moreover, fleshes
out Francie's complex identity as both "pig " and "Butcher Boy."
Francie's defensive and hurt pride, as expressed by his mother's earlier
assertion that "We don't want to be like the Nugents" (19), unflods in an extended
fantasy reversal in which the Bradys are indifferent to the Nugents and the Nugents
desperately wish to be like the Bradys. When Uncle Alo arrives for the Christmas-
time family reunion, for example , Francie thinks, "Nugent has nobody like him" :
"I still couldn't stop looking at" Alo, "the gold tiepin and his polished nails,
the English voice. Nugent's was only half-English. The more you thought it the
harder it was to believe that Nugent had ever been anything worth talking about"
(28-9). Time and again Francie fantasizes a scence in which he and Alo are

on the Diamond getting ready to set off once more down the street and Mrs Nugent
[tries] to attract our attention. Please Francie, I'll give you anything she'd say.
Sorry, I'd say, too late. Then I'd cut her off and say: what was that you were
saying Uncle Alo? (22)

Such fantasies of superiority over the anglicized Nugents of course only reveal the
extent to which the Irish Bradys have internalized the townpeople's sense of their
inferiority.
An important text that further fleshes out the trope of the Irish as pigs and
that serves as a commentary on McCabe's novel in other ways is the Irishman
Jonathan Swift's satiric "A modest proposal" (1729), which proposes a solution "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."58
Swift's satire of proposed infanticide and cannibalism - killing two birds

191