Journal Of Music editor Toner Quinn introduces a new volume, The Radical Thinking of Desmond Fennell, celebrating the life and writings of the late writer, essayist, cultural philosopher, and linguist.
A few years before Desmond Fennell passed away on 16 July 2021, he wrote to me and asked me to be one of his literary executors. I had begun publishing articles by Desmond in 2000 and, a year later, edited a collection of essays about his life and work. This was followed by publishing his part-memoir, The Turning Point: My Sweden Year and After, and, two years later, his pamphlet, Savvy and the Preaching of the Gospel.
We became friends and stayed in contact. He was an experienced editor and often provided me with advice on my subsequent publishing. On one occasion, when I was trying to raise funds for a magazine, he arranged a meeting for me with a wealthy financier. My pitch was unsuccessful but it illustrated for me the way Desmond thought: if you believe in your ideas, be ambitious, and get them out there. That is how he lived his life.
But I should say that my relationship with Desmond went deeper than publishing. In fact, he impacted my life before I was born. My father came to know him in the 1960s and it was Desmond’s 1969 essay on the Gaeltacht, ‘Revival or Not?’, that encouraged my parents to move to Conamara, where I was born. Yet his influence on my parents goes back even further than that. My mother tells me that her first date with my father was actually a Desmond Fennell book launch. The book was The Changing Face of Catholic Ireland (1968) – and my parents really were that changing face. They rejected their faith, left their jobs and moved west, turning up at the door of the Fennells in 1970. For the next decade both families lived in Conamara and my parents became close friends with Desmond and his wife Mary.
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Listen, via RTÉ Raidió Na Gaeltachta: Toner Quinn on Desmond Fennell
I knew the writer, therefore, as a child. My memories of him were that he could be a serious man, not always taken with us boisterous children. He would come over to our house in An Cheathrú Rua and hold forth on a particular topic. He and my father would half argue but ultimately agree, while the Quinn and Fennell children played together. When my mother would read Desmond’s newspaper column later that week, she would realise that he was trying out his ideas on them.
But when I was growing up, I had no idea who this person Desmond Fennell really was, and it was a surprise to me when in my early twenties I picked up his 1993 book Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland and connected with his writing.
It was the concluding chapter in Heresy, ‘Intellect and National Welfare’, that pushed me into publishing. Desmond discussed what he called ‘the processing factor in the intellectual economy’, the journey of how new ideas go from the individual writer or thinker to a community of readers, and how the ideas are then discussed, debated and developed, eventually reaching a wider public and being accepted or rejected as a new way of thinking. That social process was Desmond’s passion and he wrote and spoke about it often. It intrigued me too and I could see that publishing was key.
Encouraged by these ideas, therefore, I planned to move to Scotland to study publishing at the University of Stirling, but just before I did, by coincidence, I bumped into Desmond in a coffee shop in Dublin. I had hardly met him since I was a child. ‘I’m reading Heresy,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s great!’
‘Ah, so you are finding out what’s going on in this country,’ he said.
‘Yes, I am!’ I replied.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m available.’
And with that, he was gone. But from that meeting, we began a correspondence that lasted almost twenty years.
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Listen: Miriam O'Callaghan remembers Desmond Fennell
At this stage, I didn’t fully appreciate the intellectual battles that he had been engaged in for many years, but I began to get a sense that he was a controversial voice – even ‘dangerous’. He had been boxed into a conservative category and yet he rejected this lazy stereotyping. His ambition, he would tell me, was to describe the reality of a situation in as accurate a way as possible, regardless of whether it was deemed acceptable or fashionable. ‘There must be no false note,’ he would say.
He was forthright, it was true, because he believed in the integrity of his ideas and worked extremely hard on them. When he was working on The Revision of European History (2003), he read up on the entire history of Western classical music, and, because I had a music degree, happily summarised centuries of musical development for me over the phone in just a few sentences.
And he could be encouraging. On one occasion when I was doubting my plans for a publication, he sent an email in block caps: 'ALWAYS BELIEVE IN YOUR IDEAS'. But despite the genial relationship that we had, we regularly disagreed too, especially when it came to publishing his own work. When he had something provocative to say, as he often did, I would question whether it was entirely necessary. ‘Desmond,’ I would say, ‘there is a lot that is important in this work, but if you leave that sentence in, no one will talk about anything but that sentence.’ ‘Toner!’ he would reply, ‘That is the writer’s decision!’ And I accepted that, and learned from it.
Watch: National independence -- what does it mean today? Desmond Fennell speaks at the Desmond Greaves School in 2013
During these later years, he was developing his ‘postwestern civilisation’ theory, and he was not writing about Ireland in a detailed way. There had been a radical shift in his thinking. In his own copy of Heresy, he has left a note for a future reader, glued opposite the title page: ‘This book is the last one that I wrote with commitment to the Irish Revolution and in the belief that ways of realising it were worth reflecting on. Afterwards in 1994–6 came the American sojourns which revealed to me that the state of affairs obtaining in the West precluded both that Irish possibility and any other possibility of a socially idealistic nature.’
Desmond's postwestern theory suggested that we had entered a new era – or civilisation – after the Hiroshima bomb, but that we were still in the 'chaos period’, when the ‘rules’ of the new civilisation were being figured out. This, he argued, was why the world simply didn’t make sense to people. Eventually the money and the financial system that we used to paper over this chaos would peter out, he wrote, and, ultimately, the general population would revolt. The ultimate task today, he argued, to avoid the worst effects of this, was to make sense of the world for people and transform the chaos into a civilisation. Desmond put forward those ideas from the mid-1990s onwards and right up to 2012 when he published Third Stroke Did It: The Staggered End of European Civilisation, but there was little public response. It was a complex and bold theory, but following the economic crash of 2008, Trump and Brexit in 2016, then Trump again in 2024, combined with the rejection of liberal values that we have seen, it did seem that he was incredibly prescient.
Each day seems to suggest that Fennell was considering the right questions, and our hope is that more people will engage with his work.
The correspondence between Desmond and I continued until 2017. That was the last time I received an email from him. The final time that we spoke on the phone, in the summer of 2019, when he was 90, there was only talk of the big questions. ‘Where is society going, Toner?’ he asked. ‘Who is showing us the way forward?’ I ventured that he had shown us one way forward, with his emphasis on the role of thinking and reflection in society, the importance of generating new ideas, and strengthening public debate. ‘Ah, Toner,’ he said, ‘you were always loyal to me.’ Perhaps I was, but I still believe that this process of putting forward big ideas and encouraging public discussion is central to the health of our society. It is in that spirit that we issue a new volume of his work, The Radical Thinking of Desmond Fennell.
When, in January 2024, Jerry White and I embarked on putting together this collection, we did not know what the twenty-first century readership for Fennell might be. It was a welcome surprise, therefore, when we received an invitation to take part in a seminar in Dublin in June last year titled ‘Desmond Fennell and Ireland: Past, Present and Future’, organised by Gerard O’Neill and Finbarr Bradley with James Bradshaw. At this event we saw the arrival of a new generation of thinkers and Fennell readers. Why is Fennell’s work still relevant today? Because it compels us to think more deeply about our society, to question why we think the way we do, and to consider how our thinking is shaped by historical and contemporary influences. More than that, his work is empowering: it demonstrates that we are not passive observers of the world but participants who can rethink and reshape it.
Each day seems to suggest that Fennell was considering the right questions, and our hope is that more people will engage with his work. That was the discourse he wished for. Thankfully, his extensive legacy – 19 books and 13 pamphlets, not to mention countless newspaper articles and essays – means that Desmond Fennell is always ‘available’ to us all.
The Radical Thinking of Desmond Fennell, edited by Toner Quinn and Jerry White and published by Boluisce Press, will be launched by Michael Cronin on 6th June at the Desmond Fennell Summer Seminar at the Sandymount Hotel in Dublin. Find out more here.
