Desmond Fennell (born 1929) is an Irish writer, cultural philosopher and linguist, specialising in the essay and the reflective travel narrative, who lives in Dublin. His principal themes have been the Irish Revolution and the task of completing it; Irish Catholicism; the condition of the contemporary West; and European history.
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Born in Belfast in 1929, he grew up in Dublin, attending O'Connell School and Belvedere College. First place in Ireland in French and German in the Leaving Certificate was followed by a scholarship in Classical Languages for University College Dublin, which he entered in 1947. While completing a BA there in History and Economics, he studied English and Spanish in Trinity College, Dublin. During the two years, 1950-52, devoted to an MA in Modern History from UCD, he found inspiration in the teaching of Desmond Williams, and spent two semesters at Bonn University, Germany. There followed three years teaching English in a secondary school near Bilbao, Spain, and a study tour of American schools on its behalf.
While still a student, Fennell contributed a column in Irish to The Sunday Press. There he befriended Douglas Gageby who, later, as editor of The Irish Times, was to give him free rein in that newspaper. Back in Germany in 1955 as an English newsreader on Die Deutsche Welle (German overseas radio), he contributed articles to Comhar and The Irish Times; radio talks to writer Francis McManus at Radio Éireann; and theatre criticism to The Times, London.
Immersion in German culture had aroused in Fennell an interest in the human condition[1] This in part explains a feature of his early writing – it would surface again in the 1990s – which differed from the practice of Irish Catholics generally. He investigated and wrote about “alien” - non-Irish, non-Catholic - lands and peoples. His first book Mainly in Wonder (1959), published by Hutchinson, London, was a reflective account of a year’s travel mainly in the Far East. After a year as first sales manager, Germany, for the Irish airline Aer Lingus he spent 1960 researching a book in what was then avant-garde “pagan” Sweden, and contributed to The Irish Times the first direct reportage from the Soviet Union (15 articles) to appear in an Irish newspaper.
Fennell returned to Ireland in 1961 and summarised his Swedish experience in an essay "Goodbye to Summer"[2] which drew press reaction from Sweden to the US. He had gone to Sweden attracted by what he believed was an excitingly new 'liberal', post-European, post-Christian venture in living, and had been severely disillusioned. As a consequence, that year began his long-lasting effort to understand what was afoot, historically and ideologically, in the contemporary West.[3]
Fennell, for whom painting has always been a passion, wrote art criticism for several Dublin publications[4] and was briefly exhibitions officer of the Irish Arts Council. He met and married Mary Troy. Influenced by the approaching fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, he read the writings of the leaders of the Irish Revolution, identifying their project as a restorative humanism: a movement aiming to restore broken man in Ireland as a democratically self-governing nation, economically self-sustaining, intellectually self-determining and culturally self-shaping. Significant Fennell essays of this time were “Will the Irish Stay Christian?”, “The Failure of the Irish Revolution - and Its Success”, “Cuireadh chun na Tríú Réabhlóide”[5] and “Irish Catholics and Freedom since 1916”. He enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Fr. Austin Flannery OP, editor of the monthly journal Doctrine and Life which published a succession of his writings.
The full achievement of the Revolution’s aims became a guiding motivation and theme of Fennell's writing for the next twenty-five years. This included, and ran parallel to, advocacy of an Ireland, a Europe and a world rendered self-governing as a ‘community of communities’, exemplified in the pamphlet with maps Sketches of the New Ireland(1973) and the book Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle against Provinciality in the Modern World(1985)[6] In this advocacy he was inspired by Tom Barrington, director of the Institute of Public Administration and worked with other like-minded persons.
In 1964 Fennell moved with wife and son to Freiburg, Germany, as assistant editor of Herder Correspondence, the English-language version of Herder-Korrespondenz; a Catholic journal of theology, philosophy and politics which played a leading "progressive" role during the Second Vatican Council. In 1966, as editor, Fennell returned to Dublin. Two years later he resigned and moved with his family to Maoinis in Irish-speaking South Connemara. He included many of his anonymous essays for Herder Correspondence in a book edited by him,The Changing Face of Catholic Ireland (1968).
During the following four years Fennell wrote an influential column for the Dublin Sunday Press. His principal themes in the Connemara period (1968–1979) were the “revolution” of the Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking districts (which he helped to initiate [7] and in which he participated); the pursuit of a settlement in Northern Ireland at war; decentralisation of Irish government to regions and districts; and a “Europe of Regions”.[8]
Mainly in The Irish Times, The Sunday Press and several pamphlets, Fennell modified the nationalist position on Northern Ireland. While pioneering recognition of the Northern unionists as British – "the Ulster British" – he argued for British-Irish joint rule, persuaded the North's Social Democratic and Labour Party to declare for it, and helped to elaborate Sinn Féin's four-province federal proposal.[9]
From 1976 to 1982, Fennell lectured in Political Science and tutored in Modern History at University College Galway. In 1980 he resumed his column in the Sunday Press and two years later returned to Dublin as lecturer in English Writing in the Dublin Institute of Technology.
In his column, and in the books The State of the Nation: Ireland Since the Sixties(1983) and Nice People and Rednecks:Ireland in the 1980s(1986), while continuing his “two ethnic identities” line on the North, During the 1980s, Fennell wrote a number of books and pamphlets which advocated a strongly traditionalist conservative position. Fennell's books "The State of the Nation" and "Nice People and Rednecks" were strongly antagonistic to feminism, divorce, and abortion, while supporting traditional Roman Catholicism, the Fianna Fail party under Charles Haughey and traditional Irish culture. [10] [11] According to historian Tom Garvin, Fennell saw "the rise of the liberals" in Ireland as part of a process "which is turning the Republic back into a mere province of the United Kingdom". [10] In 1990, the National University of Ireland awarded him its DLitt (Doctor of Literature) degree for his published work.
In the early 1990s Fennell abandoned what he called his “social idealism” in the Irish and broader spheres. Recognising that the Irish Revolution had failed irretrievably to achieve its aims, he concluded that the power of the West’s “consumerist empire” effectively prevented any “community of communities”.[12] In 1990 he had begun his second “abroad” period with a visit to East Germany to record the last days of that Communist state in Dreams of Oranges. Fennell's publication of 1991, "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is Number 1" angered admirers of Heaney because it contested Heaney's reputation as a major poet and accused Heaney of ignoring the problems affecting Catholics in Northern Ireland.[13] [14]
Fennell’s concluding view of the present condition of the West, developed through a series of essays and lectures, is that European or Western civilisation has been ending through three successive rejections of it by the Russian, German and Second American revolutions. Fennell has stated "the rules of Western civilisation are well known. Massacre and abortion are grevious crimes. Christian morality guides the making of laws. Men's work and women's work are different. Chastity and frugality are admirable virtues. Homosexual relationships are an unnatural vice. Women are legally subordinate to men". [15] The surviving post-European substitute, the left-liberal values-and-rules system of the Second American Revolution, (which Fennell claims is "senseless") has been made bearable to westerners only by “the constant increase of the power to buy and do” which it provided. When that constant increase ends, the ensuing social chaos will invite the rise of a successor civilisation.[16]
Remarkably, neither this contentious account of the end of western civilisation nor Fennell's writings since 1996 on the "postwestern condition” and the “revision of European history”, have drawn any considered published reaction in Irish intellectual circles. In part this is because new, original thinking on human or world issues is very rare in Ireland, so that if it does occur, those Irish who might respond to it, one way or another, are unsure how to deal with it.
Irish writer John Waters has a point when he says that “modern Irish culture deals with the great questions of life by avoiding them”. Indicative of the situation, and contributing to it, is the fact that Ireland uniquely in Europe has no magazine of ideas and that its history magazine History Ireland deals only with Irish history.
In recent years Fennell has had a certain amount of contact with the successor groups of the British and Irish Communist Organisation, although he differs from them on certain points. His most recent books,such as Ireland After the End of Western Civilisation were published by their Athol Press imprint, and he regularly writes articles for their monthly magazine, the Irish Political Review.