Friday, June 6th, will see the second Desmond Fennell Summer Seminar take place at the Sandymount Hotel, Donnybrook, Dublin. “In the heart of the beast”, as Fennell himself might have put it as a lifelong dissident against the Irish liberal bourgeois consensus that has become notionally associated with “D4.”
What adds to the occasion this year is the launch of a new book, The Radical Thinking of Desmond Fennell, by Professor Michael Cronin of Trinity College. The book, edited by Toner Quinn and Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, Jerry White, will be published by Boluisce Press in June.
The germ for this publication was explained by Toner and Jerry at the inaugural event in the same venue last June. Basically, it came about as an attempt to gather together a selection of Fennell’s most important writings with a view to providing an introduction for a new audience to his work. With a longer term project perhaps leading to eventual republication of his entire corpus which spanned many decades. As Toner pointed out last year, six of Fennell’s later works were self-published and therefore unavailable to most readers.
Last year’s seminar was a highly stimulating event, and witnessed a very interesting coming together of Desmond Fennell’s family, old friends, more “mature” people who count Fennell as among our inspirations, and a younger generation of national minded and “dissident” thinkers, writers, and indeed, activists who discovered Fennell for themselves and found in him a voice that had been largely silenced over the years with the dominance of revisionism, anti-Gaelicism and a faux Anglophone and anglocentric cosmopolitanism.
That has been a superficial sophistication for an intellectual and administrative elite which almost defines the term “deracination.” It is a cobbled together ad hoc mish mash that pales in the face of Fennel’s own erudition and experience and indeed that of the tradition from which he sprang, the Irish Gaelic tradition, which for more than a millennium was a central part of the European Catholic tradition.
In which respect, I am greatly looking forward to Finbar Bradley’s perspective on the debate over the Irish language and its future between Fennell and another giant Monsignor Breandán Ó Doibhlin who died in September 2023. That debate took place in 1966 and followed the publication in Comhar (Nollaig 1965) of a review by Fennell of Michael Collin’s The Path to Freedom.
That was published later by Fennell as a pamphlet Cuireadh chun na ‘triu’ reabhloide and sparked lively debate on all sides. I am certain that Finbar will provide a good insight into that from both the perspective of the time and in the context of where we are now.
Despite the seeming anachronistic aspect of intellectual debates that took place more than half a century ago, they are still relevant – as is the fact that Fennell’s review in Comhar was of Collin’s speeches and scattered writings published in 1922 and that this was part of a reflection by a new generation on where the Revolution of the early part of the 20th century had ended up.
One thing for certain was that the revolution had ended, and it is the continuing abandonment of the objectives of that revolution in all its aspects from the language to sovereignty to the economy that has drawn another generation back to Fennell. And indeed to Ó Doibhlin and Máirtín Ó Cadhain and the fundamentals which they sought to place front and centre of Irish intellectual discourse.
Another small step will be taken towards that on Friday June 6 and it will be an event well worth attending and participating in.
Tickets for the seminar can be purchased at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/desmond-fennell-radicalism-relevance-tickets-1318804492739?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl
Further reading: https://gript.ie/desmond-fennells-guide-to-almost-everything/