Desmond Fennell

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 "restorative humanism": a movement aiming to redefine Ireland as a democratically self-governing nation, economically self-sustaining, intellectually self-determining and culturally self-shaping.

Some 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" and "Irish Catholics and Freedom since 1916".

He collaborated with Fr. Austin Flannery OP, editor of the monthly journal Doctrine and Life which published his writings.

Desmond Carolan Fennell (29 June 1929 – 16 July 2021) was an Irish writer, essayist, cultural philosopher, and linguist.

Throughout his career, Fennell repeatedly departed from prevailing norms.

Desmond Fennell was born on the Antrim Road in Belfast in 1929.

He was raised in Dublin from the age of three—first in East Wall, and then in Clontarf.

His father, a Sligoman, lost his job during the American Great Depression but prospered in Dublin in the wholesale grocery business.

His mother was the daughter of a Belfast shopkeeper.

His grandfather was a native Irish-speaker from the Sperrins in County Tyrone.

In Dublin, Fennell attended the Christian Brothers O'Connell School and Jesuit Belvedere College.

In the Leaving Certificate Examination, he obtained first place in Ireland in French and German and was awarded a scholarship in classical languages at University College Dublin, which he entered in 1947.

While completing a BA in history and economics, he also studied English and Spanish at Trinity College Dublin.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, with his extensive foreign travel and reporting and his travel book, Mainly in Wonder, he departed from the norm of Irish Catholic writing at the time.

Inspired by the teaching of Desmond Williams, Fennell went on to pursue an MA in modern history from University College Dublin, which he obtained in 1952 after spending two semesters at Bonn University in Germany.

He then spent three years teaching English in a new Opus Dei secondary school near Bilbao, Spain, and conducted a study tour of American schools on its behalf.

Back in Germany in 1955, as an English newsreader on Deutsche Welle, he contributed articles to Comhar and The Irish Times; radio talks to writer Francis McManus at Radio Éireann; and theatre criticism to the London Times.

Travel in the Far East 1957-58 gave the material for his first book Mainly in Wonder, 1959.

His immersion in German culture resulted in Fennell's interest in the human condition.

As a student, Fennell contributed a column in Irish to The Sunday Press.

There he befriended Douglas Gageby, who later became editor of The Irish Times.

Gageby gave Fennell free rein to publish in the newspaper.

From the late 1960s into the 1970s, in developing new approaches to the partition of Ireland and the Irish language revival, he deviated from political and linguistic Irish nationalism, and with the philosophical scope of his Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle against Provinciality in the Modern World, from contemporary Irish culture generally.

Fennell opposed the Western neo-liberal ideologies.

After a year saving money as the first sales manager in Germany for the Irish airline Aer Lingus, he spent 1960 researching a book in what was then "pagan" Sweden and contributed the first direct reportage from the Soviet Union (15 articles) to appear in an Irish newspaper to The Irish Times.

In the early 1960s, Fennell contributed essays for several Dublin publications and was briefly exhibitions officer of the new Irish Arts Council.

Back in Ireland in 1961, Fennell outlined his Swedish experience in an essay "Goodbye to Summer" which drew press reaction from Sweden to the US and was referred to by President Eisenhower.

Fennell had visited Sweden attracted by what he believed was a new liberal, post-European, post-Christian venture in living, but it did not meet his expectations.

As a result, that year began his long-lasting effort to understand the history and ideology in the contemporary West.

In 1963, in Dublin, Fennell married Mary Troy, a Limerick woman and student of Semitic languages at Trinity College.

The couple went on to have five children.

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.

In a book which he edited, The Changing Face of Catholic Ireland (1968) he included many of his anonymous essays for Herder Correspondence.

During the following four years, Fennell wrote an influential column for the Dublin Sunday Press.

His principal themes in the Connemara period (1968–79) were the "revolution" of the Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking districts (which he helped to initiate and in which he participated, drawing on Maoist ideas) and advocating, in imitation of the revival of Hebrew, migration of the nation's scattered Irish speakers to the Gaeltacht to build there the base for the restoration of Irish; the pursuit of a settlement in Northern Ireland at war; decentralisation of Irish government to regions and districts; and a "Europe of Regions".

In those last pursuits he was inspired by Tom Barrington, director of the Institute of Public Administration and by the Breton political émigré in Connemara, Yann Fouéré.

This activity issued in an advocacy, partly inspired by the early Irish socialist William Thompson, of an Ireland, a Europe and a world rendered self-governing as "communities of communities".

In 1991, Fennell wrote a pamphlet challenging the prevalent critical view of Seamus Heaney as a poet of the first rank; in 2003 he wrote a small book where he revised the standard account of European history, and in 2007, his essay Beyond Vasari’s Myth of Origin offered a new version of its early history.