Desmond Fennell’s guide to almost everything

It has been almost three years since the death of the great Irish writer and philosopher, Desmond Fennell. In the course of a literary career spanning well over half a century, Fennell wrote about topics as diverse as art, the Northern conflict, the need for local government reform, the survival of the Gaeltacht, the role of Christianity in Irish life, European socialism and the ‘Postwestern Civilisation’ we now live in.

There has been a renewed interest in Fennell’s writings of late, with media pieces and lectures exploring the contribution Fennell made to the national discourse, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was “one of Ireland’s pre-eminent political and cultural commentators”.

Here follows an overview of some of his most memorable words about a range of topics as expressed in the more than 30 books and pamphlets which Ireland’s almost-forgotten intellectual wrote.

Desmond Fennell on Dublin 4 and the division between ‘Nice People’ and ‘Rednecks’

As the culture war heated up in the 1980s and issues like abortion were voted on, Fennell saw that the elites were intent on dividing the country up into two groups: the ‘Nice People’ and the ‘Rednecks.’

 ‘Nice People & Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s’ (1986)

“The Nice People are the Dublin liberal middle class and their allies and supporters throughout the country. The Rednecks are everyone else, but especially Fianna Fáil under Charles Haughey, the great majority of Catholics and their bishops, all Catholic organisations, the IRA and GAA, Sinn Fein, and the Fine Gael dissidents who frustrate Garret FitzGerald’s good intentions. The criteria which define people as ‘nice, reasonable, decent, etc.’ are a displayed distaste for those excrescences and noises in our public life which prevent the Republic from fitting unnoticeably into the British Isles, like a sort of larger Isle of Man…”

Dublin 4 appeared intent on dragging a backward country along with it. For Fennell, this appeared to be a case of history repeating itself, with Dublin 4 now in place of the old London-facing establishment.

‘Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland’ (1993)

“Historically, Dublin 4 recalls that earlier Irish state class, the eighteenth-century Protestant Ascendancy, which had a similar relationship to the mass of the people, a similar special position and outward dependency.”

 Desmond Fennell on Ireland’s cultural impoverishment prior to the ‘Irish Revolution’

 As he himself wrote, the “completion of the Irish Revolution” was Fennell’s core domestic goal. He wanted to finish the work of the revolutionary period in the late 19th and early 20th century by creating a sovereign and unified Ireland speaking its own language and practising its own culture. To Fennell, Ireland had lost a great deal compared to other countries and needed to recover its identity.

 ‘Mainly in Wonder’ (1959)

 “We of the Irish Catholic peasantry – the largest by far of the groups which make up Ireland – are recent in another sense. History robbed us of nearly everything which we brought with us from the remote past. In our worst days, in the eighteenth century, we existed for several generations with literally nothing but our bodies, our family attachments, our songs, our religious and political faiths and hopes. When we began to rise in the nineteenth century our cultural heritage was almost nil. We had no house-styles, no furniture, no native costumes that did more than clothe, no really native dances, no theatre, no distinctive ways of preparing food, no churches, no elaborate etiquette. We came naked into the modern world. Even our political creeds were not drawn out of our history. Neither were they decided by rational choice. We took what lay to hand and what served us.”

Desmond Fennell on the persecution of Irish Nationalists in the North

 For Fennell, the Northern conflict was fundamentally caused by the denial of the rights of the Irish who lived in the Six Counties. Only by recognising and protecting their Irishness could it be ended.

 ‘Nice People & Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s’ (1986)

“The core of that injustice [towards the Six-County Irish] is the denial of their existence which is enshrined in the constitution of Northern Ireland and its civic symbols and institutions. These assert daily that all the inhabitants of the Six Counties are British people with British loyalties, and deny daily that 600,000 of them are Irish people with Irish loyalties. Hand in hand with that denial goes contempt for those 600,000 people and for every symbol or manifestation of their identity, whether as Irish or (in the case of most of them) as Catholics. This contempt is expressed daily in searchings at checkpoints, in verbal insults by police or soldiers, in the tearing down of Tricolours, the banning of processions through village main streets and city-centres, the mis-spelling of Gaelic names in the telephone directory, the vindictive stripping of women prisoners in Armagh jail, the roaring helicopters hovering over funerals, the dismissal of court cases brought against British police or soldiers who have killed Irish people.”

Desmond Fennell on the postwestern world

The vast slaughter of civilians in World War Two represented a turning point in Western civilisation, according to Fennell, with the acceptance of the horrors of Hiroshima being particularly important.

‘Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima and the Beginning of Postwestern Civilisation’ (1996)

“For the fact that Hiroshima was, by the standards of western civilisation, ‘barbarous’ means that the West’s endorsement of it, as a civilised and moral act, effectively changed the meaning of ‘civilised’ in the West, and founded a new civilisation. More explicitly, the endorsement of Hiroshima, with the accompanying renunciation and acceptance of rules and conditions for legitimate massacre, and the arming of the West with weapons of massacre, amounted to the rejection of modern western civilisation and the launching of a post-western one.”

Desmond Fennell on the liberal assault on Catholicism and nationalism in Ireland

 Fennell detected a new mood from the 1950s onwards, which was particularly keenly felt in elite circles in South Dublin. Thus began a project to redefine ‘Irish Republicanism’ in a way that struck at the heart of Irish identity as it had historically been understood.

 ‘The State of the Nation: Ireland since the Sixties’ (1983)

“‘Republicanism,’ reinterpreted by the new elite, meant something quite different from what de Valera had meant by it: namely, the pursuit of an all-Ireland state whose laws and institutions would serve the purposes of consumer capitalism. For minds newly enlightened by the light from London, partition was no longer an injustice perpetrated by Britain against Ireland, but a problem, largely of our own making, which would be solved by the removal of religious influences from the laws of the Republic, and by ‘reconciliation’ in the North.”

Desmond Fennell on The Irish Times

Though he often wrote for it throughout his long career, Fennell remained conscious of a certain newspaper’s roots, and underlying attitudes.

‘About Being Normal: My Life in Normal Circumstances’ (2017)

“The Irish Times, a Protestant-owned newspaper and a sort of Irish version of the English Guardian, has played a provocative ‘outsider’s’ role, publishing variations on the theme that ‘you Irish [Catholics] are not as good as you think you are.’”

Desmond Fennell on pluralism

Fennell defended the views of cultural minorities in large part due to his deep belief in the value of diversity in life.

‘Nice People & Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s’ (1986)

“As my regular readers know, I personally would like much more than that. I believe in federal constitutions, such as Switzerland, West Germany or the USA, which don’t have only one legal system for the entire country, but which allow the various federal units – the various provinces, cantons or states – to make their own laws about most matters. I admire the old Ottoman empire which allowed the various Christian communities and the Jews, not only to maintain their own schools, but to administer their own marriage laws and related matters. I abhor the imposition of unnecessary uniformity. I believe that justice and peace among nations, and within nations, begins with the honest recognition of diversity.”

Desmond Fennell on paganism

One advantage of Fennell’s wide travels was his familiarity with the world which Irish liberals were so intent on copying while jettisoning Christian moral values.

‘Nice People & Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s’ (1986)

“‘If the Catholic clergy would only stop interfering, and if we got religion out of our schools and laws and public life, we would come into our own as human beings; we would have a rational, peaceful, liberated life.’ Nonsense. ‘If we had contraceptives for all, and divorce and abortion, people would be freer, and family, love and marriage would flourish as never before.’ Nonsense again. That’s why I like pagan places like Paris or Stockholm: no one there bores you with such twaddle and no one believes it. All of those things have happened there long ago, as they have happened in most of the world, and the result is not a free, human or fulfilled life, but the anxious, helpless and dehumanised life of modern man. I love talking to the pagan men and women – real men and women of my times – who know this to be the case, who are concerned about it, and who are trying in a hundred different ways to do something about it. When I call them ‘pagan’ I mean they have left formal religion behind them a long time ago – so long ago and so thoroughly that they have no chip on their shoulder about it, and don’t talk about it, let alone blame it for the way the world is.”

Desmond Fennell on abortion

 If there was one issue that marked Fennell out as a dangerous spokesperson for ‘Redneck’ views, it was the right to life of the unborn child. For him, the movement to support legalised abortion was fundamentally a reversion to the paganism of old.

 ‘Nice People & Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s’ (1986)

“One of the features of European life as it turned from paganism to Christianity were the laws and ordinances which forbade the abandonment of the old, the sick, or infants, and the massacre of civilians in warfare. The principle was established and accepted that life could be taken, legitimately, only in narrowly defined circumstances, and the life of babies, born or unborn, never. Institutions for the care of foundlings were one of the distinctive Christian charities…”

“Since the ‘60s, massacre by legalised abortion has become common practice in the West. Its role in the general scheme of things is to inure us to the occurrence of massacre and to the notion that it can be legitimate. In particular, it serves to kill the idea that the life of weak and defenceless persons is especially sacred, especially to be protected, and that the massacre of such persons is an especially awful crime. For obviously, there are no weaker or more defenceless persons than unborn babies.”

Desmond Fennell on the new puritanism

 Travelling around America in the 1990s, Fennell could see that a supposedly permissive culture was actually increasingly focused on unacceptable practices.

 ‘Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima and the Beginning of Postwestern Civilisation’ (1996)

“In a flurry of moral reordering covering the next twenty years, various actions which Christianity called sins were taken, authoritatively, off the sin list, and new sins (or names for sins) invented, but without calling them sins: anti-semitism, racism, McCarthyism, censorship, sexism, fundamentalism, homophobia, sexual harassment, fatness, earth abuse, smoking, pollution, unsafe sex, species murder; in certain sectors, lookism, ableism, heterosexism, flesh-eating, ageism.”

Desmond Fennell on the difference between working-class and middle-class values

 When explaining the contrast in how people from different class backgrounds perceived Charles Haughey (favoured by working-class voters) and Garret Fitzgerald (favoured by the middle-class), Fennell wrote about where those differences may have stemmed from.

‘Nice People & Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s’ (1986)

“Typically, working-class people prefer immediate to deferred enjoyment, whether of income or of earning potential. That is why working-class people often seem to have more money to spend than middle-class people, and it is also one of the chief reasons why systems of loans or grants for university studies fail to induce any significant number of working-class youths to enter the professions. The working class care more about how they themselves and things are than about how they appear to be, whereas with the middle class the reverse is true. Middle-class people want to be seen by their peers to have the right things and the right opinions, and they work hard to maintain a flattering self-image. Often they surround themselves, and cover themselves, with things that look well, whereas the working class seldom do, even when they could well afford to. The working class think, judge and act instinctively, while the middle-class are suspicious of instinct, and try to be guided by reason. Working-class people set much store by loyalty and are generally loyal to persons, parties and the nation. Middle-class people place self-interest, principle and social approval several degrees above loyalty, and their allegiances are therefore more volatile.”

Desmond Fennell on the weakness of Catholic culture in Ireland

 Already well travelled in European as well as global terms, Fennell’s relocation to Italy in later life resulted in him thinking deeply about the degree to which Irish Catholicism differed. Unlike in Italy, the faith had not really permeated into Irish cultural life.

 ‘Ireland After the End of Western Civilisation’ (2009)

“I continue to be struck by something that struck me then. Although regular practice of Catholicism is considerably less in Italy than even today in the Republic of Ireland, the Catholic religion is much more in evidence there than here. Also, as an offshoot of that, there is much more public recognition of many people’s belief in the existence of a spiritual world, and of the pursuit of holiness, as elements of life past and present. In part this has to do with the strong persistence in Italy of a Catholic culture in the form of town and city festivals, mostly in honour and commemoration of a dead saint, or to mark some Church holy day such as the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. All of these festivals are enacted or participated in by thousands of people or, as in Catania for the feast of Saint Agatha, by an entire large city. Our ruinous history, by one means or another, deprived us of such a normal heritage of a Catholic people. Indeed, St. Patrick’s Day apart, our special public holidays are days when the banks are closed. If ever there were a parody of a capitalist society! Moreover, in Italy, in these great public religious occasions, the civic authorities actively participate.”

Desmond Fennell on the Spire of Dublin

 Seeing what Ireland’s politicians had erected in the centre of the capital’s main thoroughfare, Fennell was not impressed.

‘Ireland After the End of Western Civilisation’ (2009)

“When I first saw it, I remarked that it would have been more suitable for the other Blackpool, the popular English seaside resort, than for the centre of Ireland’s capital city. But on reflection, I recognised that it was at least an honest statement of the Republic’s state of mind after its prudent self-effacement during the Northern War and during the past-effacing enrichment of the Celtic Tiger boom. It stood for, represented, and said Nothing.”

Desmond Fennell on whether Ireland was really a nation

Writing while at university several decades after partial independence had been achieved, the young Desmond was troubled by the question of whether Ireland was a true country or not.

‘About Being Normal: My Life in Normal Circumstances’ (2017)

“Our parliament modelled on Westminster, our laws largely English, our etiquette and social usage English, English the language of almost the entire country, what claim have we to nationhood? Race? But purity of race is not essential to nationhood, and anyhow our Danish, Norman, Scots and English elements would be something of a stumbling-block. Tradition and history? But we have separated ourselves from our traditions and our present ideas have their roots elsewhere. Exiled from our national heritage, our history is merely the story of our biological antecedents. We have coins of our own and stamps and a tricolour and a national anthem, and our letter-boxes are painted emerald green, but the basic fact of nationality – distinctive national institutions and culture and way of life – are non-existent. Our nationality is a myth of imagination. Those things which make up a nation we just have not got.”

Desmond Fennell on his overarching goal

 Fennell was clear about what he was striving for in all his work: an Ireland that was truly free. Those promoting a liberal agenda were working against these efforts.

‘Cutting to the Point: Essays and Objections, 1994-2003’ (2003)

“The fact is that, from the last 1960s into the ‘70s, when it all began, the liberal agenda in its broadest sense – including its centralist, anti-nationalist and London-directed aspects – was clashing with my own agenda, which was the completion of the Irish Revolution. An Ireland democratically self-governing in all its parts, economically self-sustaining, intellectually self-determining and culturally self-shaping was my goal. Inasmuch as Dublin liberalism was also then beginning its assault on the people’s religion, I was irritated by this, but on national grounds mainly…”

Desmond Fennell on the success of the Irish Revolution of the late 1800s and early 1900s

 Always ready to do battle against revisionists when it came to the topic of Irish history, Fennell was clear about the success which Irish nationalists had had in the run-up to independence. To Fennell, their success proved that it was not just Communist revolutionaries who offered hope.

 ‘Mainly in Wonder’ (1959)

“In Ireland we made a social revolution. Three generations ago most of us were poor landless peasants; now most of us can go to good schools, we have land, houses, etc., and we share in the government of our country. But we carried out this revolution without recourse to Marxism. That is one of the reasons why I am not a Marxist, for a Marxist says that there is only the Marxist way for carrying out the social revolution of the proletariat. I don’t care how the proletariat is raised up; what is important is that it gets raised up.”

Desmond Fennell on Modern Ireland’s social problems

 After the influence of Catholic morality had been purged from Irish life, many who adored the post-Christian Western lifestyle rejoiced. For Fennell though, major problems were in store.

‘Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland’ (1993)

“The value of Irish Catholicism becomes palpably evident as its influence on lives diminishes and nothing emerges to fill the vacuum but security personnel and paraphernalia, more police and vigilantes, more courts and prisons, state allowances for unmarried mothers and deserted spouses, rape crisis centres, campaigns promoting condoms, the great and increasing sums of money which pay for all this, and windy, impotent moralising.”

Desmond Fennell on the need for local government reform

 While the revolutionary leaders in the era of the War of Independence had achieved partial freedom for most of Ireland, Fennell believed that it was a mistake to not establish a new political model.

‘About Behaving Normally in Abnormal Circumstances’ (2007)

He believed “that the British arrangement of government in Ireland, which we retained intact, was not designed to accommodate the Irish human reality, but rather to suit imperial administration. The old nationalism had simply ignored the matter, taking the British arrangements as a given. It had even strengthened them by enshrining the British county system in the structure of the Gaelic Athletic Association.”

The centralising tendency of Irish bureaucracy ran contrary to how Fennell saw political and social community.

‘About Being Normal: My Life in Normal Circumstances’ (2017)

“In the bureaucracy’s views, the nation (in the Republic) was a mass of ‘individuals,’ each of whom had various administrative aspects which were to be dealt with separately by the relevant central agencies. The nation was not a community of communities, which the administrative apparatus existed to serve: each community particularly and coherently, and all of them for common purposes. In my view, the nation was precisely that. It was by nature a community of communities leading unrecognised and thwarted existences, but still existing by reason of the shared life of their members and their vague self-consciousness. For these embryonic, frustrated communities to begin to develop towards real communal being – as self-governing collectivities fashioning their own lives and worldviews – they needed territorial definition and representative institutions with executive and decision-making powers; they needed this representation of their reality to themselves.”

Desmond Fennell on how Catholicism linked Ireland to the outside world

 Far from isolating us, Fennell maintained that Ireland’s Catholic heritage linked the country to the world.

 ‘The State of the Nation: Ireland since the Sixties’ (1983)

“But our Catholicism has also a considerable linking value. It links us with the Irish in America, Australia, Argentina and Britain. Because the Irish-Americans are powerful and influential in the USA, and because the Catholic Church is both the largest religious body there and one which derives to a considerable degree from Ireland, our Catholicism gives us, so to speak, a substantial bridge across the Atlantic into the world’s most powerful country. It also links us directly with the Vatican and its world-wide influence, gives us sympathetic points of contact in much of Africa and Latin America, and affords us, through Polish Catholicism, a major access to Eastern Europe. In a particular way which defies description in detail, it links us with every place on the Continent of Europe where there is a Schottenkloster or an ancient Irish manuscript; with every town, city and village where an Irish saint is honoured, and with those two thousand places throughout the world where there is a church dedicated to St. Patrick.”

Desmond Fennell on the new liberal mood in Ireland from the 1960s onwards

Something changed in Ireland from the 1960s onwards. The Ireland which had existed since independence was now threatened by a new set of values emanating from the US and the UK.

‘The Revision of Irish Nationalism’ (1989)

“In the ideological sphere, the net result of these hectic events in the 1960s and early 70s was the complete overthrow of the definition of Irish identity which had been forged since independence. The international capitalism which ended emigration and made Ireland affluent was that consumerist capitalism with which the whole Western world had been familiar since the 50s and 60s. Its local power and propaganda centre was London, and behind London was New York. In Ireland this consumerism called into being a new leading class of politicians, businessmen, admen and media people who gave liberalism the new consumerist meaning that we are all familiar with. Out with thrift, saving, frugality; in with spending, acquisition, conspicuous consumption. Out with abstemiousness of all kinds including that of sexual morality. People have a right to contraceptives and divorce, and we must be understanding towards those women who go to England to get abortions. In short, Victorian puritanism out, and acquisitiveness and liberalism in.”

Desmond Fennell on revisionist history in Ireland

 Desmond Fennell opposed the revisionist historians, both because he disagreed with them on history, and because he believed that the advancement of such views would have a detrimental effect on the Irish nation’s sense of itself.

‘The Revision of Irish Nationalism’ (1989)

““I reject the pretension of revisionist history to be a value for the nation. I oppose its recommending itself, or its being accepted, as the proper or true history of modern Ireland. First, because I believe that its moral interpretation is not correct; second, because such history does not serve the well-being of the nation. The first of these reasons is, by its nature, open to debate – I have stated my position, which, as it happens, accords with that of the world in general with regard to Irish-British relations up to and beyond the revolution. My second reason, however, is not debatable. Every nation in its here and now, the people who make up the nation now, have needs with respect to their national history. They need for their collective well-being an image of their national past which sustains and energises them personally, and which bonds them together by making their inherited nation seem a value worth adhering to and working for.”

Desmond Fennell on the impact of the Second Vatican Council on Irish identity

 Though he supported the reforms of the Second Vatican Council at the time while working for a leading Catholic newspaper in Germany, Fennell came to have significant qualms about the impact which these sudden changes had had on Irish life and values.

 ‘The State of the Nation: Ireland since the Sixties’ (1983)

“It has been remarked, and it is true, that the Second Vatican Council, and the changes it wrought in the Catholic Church, contributed both to breaking the moulds of Irish society and to lessening the Church’s hold on people’s minds and hearts. This edifice of apparently unchangeable forms, this authority of seemingly immutable teachings, was seen to shudder, shift and change. The new forms were not as gripping as the old; the new teachings – for new is what they seemed – were vague, sentimental and modish by comparison with the rational crystal-clarity and the perennial solidity of the old. The Catholic Church ceased to be the foundation rock for Irish society which had been previously; its members felt both a greater freedom and a reduced attachment…

“Thus when the Church ended Friday abstinence, the Lenten fast, the night-long fast before Communion, the keeping of the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle on the altar, and the Latin hymns at Benediction; when it seemed to discourage, and thereby caused a gradual abandonment of, confraternities, sodalities, Sacred Heart devotions, Miraculous Medal Novenas, scapulars, the rosary, frequent confession, exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, and other practices; and when it removed most of the statues and holy pictures from the interiors of churches – it thinned Irish culture considerably, and reduced its distinctiveness from British and American culture.”

Desmond Fennell on individualism

 Though prevented by his religious beliefs from being an orthodox man of the modern Left, Fennell remained very critical of the liberal political ideology.

 ‘Mainly in Wonder’ (1959)

 “Individualism is the great enemy of Christianity; socialism is closer to the Christian ideal than liberalism. But no Christian can be a materialist, because he believes in God and in a spiritual world that exists alongside the material world.”

Desmond Fennell on socialism

Often inspired by collective action, Fennell saw many things to admire about 20th century socialism. As East Germany neared its end, he reflected on the sad failure of many socialists to truly work for a communitarian society.

‘Dreams of oranges: An eyewitness account of the fall of communist East Germany’ (1996)

“I have been inspired by the ‘other’ socialist tradition that turned away from the modern state towards a multi-centred, communitarian society of shared ownership, in which people could truly come to be masters of their lives and in which democracy would be what the word means, and not a system legitimising the imperialism of power elites in national and world power centres. I regret that, while socialism was still a messianic force moving millions, the majority of socialists did not follow that socialism. The messianic faith would not have lasted, but it would have left a world, or part of a world, more or less structured on those lines. I would have liked to see that socialism tested for its capacity to ‘produce the goods’ sufficiently: tested in a number of countries with different cultures, as the other kind has been tested and found wanting.”

Desmond Fennell on the insecurity of the Ulster Protestant population

Unlike many Irish commentators, Fennell’s view of the Northern conflict was informed by deep thinking and a keen understanding of both communities.

 ‘Cutting to the Point: Essays and Objections, 1994-2003’ (2003)

“The inherited antagonism of the Ulster British to political association with an independent Ireland arises partly from their sense of ethnic (including religious) difference, but more perhaps from their feeling of insecurity as a colonial minority in Ireland, and their fear that within an all-Ireland political structure they would be swamped and dominated, and prevented from maintaining their distinct ethos and heritage. But they neither have nor feel security in their present situation. They feel insecure with regard to the Republic and its ‘irredentist’ claims, and, within Northern Ireland itself, with regard to the substantial Irish nationalist minority. They also feel insecure vis-a-vis London. They have seen their devolved regional parliament, based on a Westminster Act of Parliament, suspended by London in 1972. Since then they have been increasingly in doubt about Britain’s intentions towards them. Their cultural links with Britain are more with Scotland than with England, and they are keenly aware that most British people have little regard for them.”

Desmond Fennell on the 1916 Rising

Fennell’s writings on 1916 made clear why he admired the revolutionary leaders.

‘Irish Catholics and Freedom since 1916’ (1984)

“[T]he leading spirits, most of them Catholics, whose example and vision the Irish Catholic people increasingly followed in the years leading up to 1921, were free men who saw in education, language revival, political and military action, labour agitation, religion, and art, complementary means to an end, that end being the personal freedom in spirit and mind, of men and women in Ireland.”

Desmond Fennell on the lack of diversity in general and poitín in particular

Banning poitín was not just about a public health crusade. For Fennell, it was about not allowing local culture to flourish.

‘A Connacht Journey’ (1987)

“When P.J. gave me a taste of the local poitín, it struck me that it was the first local drink I had drunk on my journey. In Ireland today, local drink, like local radio, is illegal. We are ruled by an antagonism to the local which is also an antagonism to diversity and a zeal to impose monotonous uniformity.”

Desmond Fennell on the crisis of identity in post-Catholic, post-Gaelic Ireland

After Ireland had shed its traditional identity, Fennell foresaw a limited number of options existing: one of which required a real self-examination by the population writ large.

‘The Revision of Irish Nationalism’ (1989)

1. We continue to accept that the Irish nation stands for nothing in particular except a vaguely Irish-flavoured Anglo-Americanism.
2. We formally join the British nation once and for all.
3. We formally join the American nation and become enthusiastic Irish-Americans.
4. We find a new, serviceable definition of Irish identity to replace the one we have lost.”

Desmond Fennell on the desire of Irish liberals to make the country catch-up and fit in

 For Fennell, the desire on the part of Irish liberals was about more than simply wanting new laws. Instead, they feared that Ireland’s existing laws would make the country stand out in some way.

 ‘Nice People & Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s’ (1986)

[The liberals, he wrote, were intent on having] “divorce in the Twenty-Six Counties in the near future – together with every other social disorder that contemporary Western decadence which we are so intent on aping. We are like blacks who get the crinkle taken out of their hair, or Orientals who get their eyes straightened, so that they’ll look more like ‘normal’ people and be less distinguishable. We hate anything that distinguishes us, or makes us stand out, in the British-American context. We want to be invisible.”

Desmond Fennell on the reluctance of the SDLP and others to embrace Irish identity

 While disagreeing with them politically, Fennell admired the eagerness of Ulster unionist leaders to embrace their people’s tradition, and questioned why the SDLP and others did not do the same.

 ‘Towards a Greater Ulster’ (1973)

“By contrast, the Catholic political leadership is shallow, inhibited and rootless. Elected by the Northern Catholics, the last things these leaders will do is declare themselves leaders of the Catholic people and spokesmen of the Catholic Irish tradition in Ulster. To listen to some of them, they might be spokesmen for the rights of some ‘minority’ in Australia or New Zealand. While the Orange leadership confesses to the Orange, the Green leadership shies away from the Green, shamefacedly or with open aversion. Elected by the Tagis, the Fenians, the Popish bastards, the dispossessed Irish and Catholics of Ulster, they turn their backs on this reality to speak for ‘non-Unionists,’ ‘the minority,’ ‘the working class’ even for ‘the Protestant working class’ which hates them. They describe themselves as ‘anti-Unionists,’ as ‘socialists,’ as spokesmen for humanity, democracy, civil rights or similar abstractions – never as leaders of the Taigs they spring from.”

Desmond Fennell on the lack of originality in Irish life

 A recurring theme in Fennell’s work is his belief that there was a resistance to originality and dissent in Irish life, coupled with a willingness to lazily accept practices and dogmas imported from elsewhere. This was making Celtic Tiger Ireland invisible.

‘Cutting to the Point: Essays and Objections, 1994-2003’ (2003)

“To put it bluntly: what is making Ireland culturally invisible is not so much the Celtic Tiger’s marginalisation of traditional Ireland as the lack of originality in Irish thinking and practice which preceded the Tiger and which still continues. Originality is another way of saying creative innovation. Even if we did not know it from personal experience, we could assume that this dearth of originality in Ireland is not due to a complete absence of questioning, freethinking, inventive Irish minds. Presumably, there are at least as many such minds here as in any other nation of our size. No, the absence of originality that can be observed in Irish public thinking and practice is due to effective opposition by Irish society to Irish original thinking getting published and discussed, or having its projects implemented. In this manner, the controlling forces in Irish society effectively compel Irish people to outward conformity and imitation.”

Desmond Fennell on the loneliness and lack of fulfilment of Sweden’s progressive utopia

 Many political thinkers in post-war Europe looked to Sweden for a vision of a utopian society; Fennell actually moved there in 1959, met its people, learned its language and engaged with its culture.

 ‘The Turning Point: My Sweden Year and After’ (2001)

“Restaurants have a strange silence, as of a church full of people awaiting the priest’s appearance. There are many very small tables and at most of them sits a single Swede in a lonely state.”

Desmond Fennell on Seamus Heaney

In his most controversial pamphlet, Fennell took the ‘Famous Seamus’ Heaney to task for not doing more to support his fellow Northern Nationalists, including during the 1981 Hunger Strike.

 ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing: Why Seamus Heaney is No. 1’ (1991)

“He suffered, as every Northern Ireland Catholic did, during the long agony of the Long Kesh hunger strike – and suffered doubly because he wrote no poem about it. Two of the dead hunger strikes, Francis Hughes and Tom McElwee, and the priest Oliver Crilly, who did most to try to get a settlement for the prisoners, came as it happened from his home place, Bellaghy. Like any Six-County Catholic, he has among his friends, acquaintances or relatives men and women who are in the IRA, others who have spent years in jail as political prisoners, or suffered otherwise in the struggles of the past twenty years.”

Desmond Fennell on the death of the Gaelic Ireland his grandfather was born in

Fennell saw in the life story of his Tyrone grandfather an overall process which he desperately wished to reverse. From his upbringing in an Irish speaking community in Tyrone to his death in a partitioned Ireland, something precious had been lost along the way.

‘Build the Third Republic’ (1972)

“Then the great flight from that life began, and he took part in it, changing from Gaelic to English speech, moving from the familiar country to the strange city. In the course of this move he became a man without status and of dubious identity. Or rather, he became a man sharing in the lowest status and identity that the English-speaking world gave to whites: Irish Catholic, papish, teague. From being a Gael, and thus a member of a great European people, he joined the people of Paddy the Irishman, grimacing ape-like from the pages of Punch. All his hard-working life until his death in Belfast (where he achieved a degree of material comfort), he remained a second-class citizen in his own country.”

Desmond Fennell’s on Ireland’s need for pilgrimages

 As he retraced the steps of Leopold Bloom in the late 1980s, Fennell could not help but notice the major difference in the cultural life of Dublin compared to other cities in Catholic Europe.

 ‘Bloomsway: A Day in the Life of Dublin’ (1990)

“The Bloomsday thing fulfils the need for pilgrimage for people who would never dream of doing a real pilgrimage. That, too, tallies with the 60s which brought a sharp new blast of secularisation to a city already remarkably secularised. A Catholic city which, unlike so many Catholic and post-Catholic cities, has no pilgrimage, nor indeed any public processional or theatrical manifestation of religion. In Bonn on St. Martin’s Day, the thousands of singing children walking with lanterns at dusk in the streets, all the church bells tolling. The Passion processions of Seville, the Virgen this and Virgen that carried through every Spanish city. The presepes everywhere in Rome at Rome at Christmas; even in the Termini station, with music, and little shepherd’s fires burning.”

Desmond Fennell on the rise of the ‘Nanny State’ in Ireland

 Fennell saw that the receding influence of the Catholic Church on the life choices of Irish people had not really resulted in widespread liberation. Instead, a new and much stronger power had emerged.

 ‘Cutting to the Point: Essays and Objections, 1994-2003’ (2003)

“The point about this, the bitter pill for our rulers to swallow, is that it’s all occurring while the State has more control over citizens’ lives than ever before; more money and police than ever before; more power – having pushed the Church aside and delegitimised local social control – to teach and inculcate virtue and supply life with meaning. Faced with such fundamental failure in its dual role as orderer and moral teacher, there is nothing more natural than to make a great show of stopping women smoking in bingo halls, and poor children having horses, and politicians managing their pubs, and restaurants making their table arrangements, and people arranging privately to get married when they choose.”

Desmond Fennell on the strength of the South Dublin liberal agenda

1980s Ireland was embroiled in a battle between the ‘Nice People’ and the ‘Rednecks.’ This, according to Fennell, was not a fair fight given where liberal power was concentrated.

‘Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland’ (1993)

“What makes their agenda matter disproportionately is that they are concentrated in the few square miles on the east coast where the power of the state and the mass media are concentrated.”

Desmond Fennell on the heavy-handed approach of the 19th century Church towards Irish culture

 Although much of Fennell’s time was taken up with his attempts to defend Catholicism from its critics, he was strongly critical of the Archbishop of Tuam for ending a night climb on Croagh Patrick, and argued that it was part of a wider problem whereby Irish clerics had not done enough to protect Irish culture.

‘Nice People & Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s’ (1986)

“The Catholic clergy worked to hasten the abandonment of the Irish language and its replacement by English. They mounted offensives against the celebrations and excursions on saints’ days which once abounded in the towns and countryside. They attacked crossroads dances, and entertainments for young people in private houses. By every means available to them, they sought to get rid of (not to reform) the traditional festive wake.”

Desmond Fennell on Irish architecture

 Writing in an early pamphlet, Fennell drew attention to the failure of the Irish people to create truly beautiful buildings: including their houses of prayer.

‘Art for the Irish’ (1961)

 “For reasons which are partly historical, partly social and psychological, we have a great dearth of art, a great lack of material beauty. Our community is spiritually rich, but unable to come to the truth of itself and to be spiritually creative in a materially beautiful way. There has probably never been a Christian people that had so many ugly churches – great, alive churches, vibrating and thundering and whispering with rich human life and with the heart’s beauty – but not offering to God and man the visible signs of love and devotion which are is or can be. Not surprisingly, their philistine shadow falls on nearly everything we make or build or have around us.”

Desmond Fennell on the Anglicisation of Ireland

A century after Douglas Hyde wrote a manifesto titled ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish Nation,’ Fennell lamented the fact that the process of Anglicisation had proceeded apace.

‘Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland’ (1993)

“[O]ur culture from our political institutions and language to ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and horse-racing is largely derivative; that our journalists belong to a British trade union and the stock exchange in Dublin is a section of the London Stock Exchange; that our thought and hence our worldview are largely borrowed from London and that we have not contributed anything of significance to the thought of our time; that when we import ideas or practices we seldom digest or rethink them so as to transform into something marked by ourselves; that our industrial exports are mainly those of foreign firms in Ireland which repatriate their profits; that we have failed to generate, out of our own enterprise and resources, an economy sufficient to maintain ourselves; that we collaborate with Britain in suppressing rebellion against British rule in Ireland and, in betrayal of our neutrality, have allowed the Republic to be integrated into the British military and military surveillance systems; and lastly, that we lack both an independent foreign policy and its principal fruit – foreign alliances created by ourselves to serve our interests.”

Desmond Fennell on the future of the Catholic Church in a secular Ireland

Anticipating in the 1990s that the Church’s decline would accelerate, Fennell saw that this would bring opportunities as well as challenges.

‘Cutting to the Point: Essays and Objections, 1994-2003’ (2003)

“By and large, then, society will continue on its new, pagan way, governed by new, pagan rules. The possibilities open to the Catholic Church will be within this context. As it did in its first Roman centuries and in penal times in Ireland, it can and will continue to exist as a community of faith in Jesus, which is its main raison d’être. Freed from responsibility for the welfare of the West generally, and the Irish in particular, the Church can and will develop and innovate, theologically, philosophically and liturgically. It will do this – as it has done before now in civilisations with which it was at odds – by observing attentively the new evolving life around it and reflecting on the Gospel in the light of this. While it cannot, by definition, join the non-Christian system, it can profit from it. Every new civilisation or new barbarism reveals new facets of human nature and of the ways of God. There is, moreover, no limit, other than practical, to the works of charity which the Church can perform for the victims of the new order.”

Conclusion

As a younger generation begins to discover him for the first time, and as established thinkers like the leading Irish-American writer Angela Nagle explore his diverse work more deeply, 2024 could well be the year that sees a major revival of interest in Desmond Fennell and his ideas.

Links

Desmond Fennell On RTÉ in 1993 in a segment called The Dublin 4 Set

Toner Quinn ag labhairt a Desmond on Raidio na Gaeltachta 

Desmond Fennell, Mír Ómóis ar Raidio na Gaeltachta

Desmond Fennell on Sunday with Miriam, RTÉ Radio 1, in 2011 when he spoke about his core beliefs and death