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For
many Irish of any ideological bent, Desmond Fennell’s
regarded as a crank. His last appearance circa 1996
as the designated media puppet for the reactionary
Gaelic-firsters, on The Late Late Show, resulted
predictably in his heckling as Gaybo sat idly by.
Now Fennell writes from an exurb north of Rome. Another
prophet without honor driven from the ‘monster
rally’. Reading Toner Quinn’s collection
of various voices raised in favour and in protest
against Fennell in print and person, you can see why
his jeremiads jab the complacent. At least the television
audience bothered to react to him, even if he never
got to talk about his latest polemic (Uncertain
Dawn). Having appeared only few years ago, I couldn’t
find a copy. As with most of his forty years of work,
it lurks out-of-print. His other titles? Tell me if
you find many on a local corporate purveyor’s
‘Irish interest’ shelf.
Local
plus corporate: one of the afflictions Fennell diagnoses.
This reifies his marginalisation--not only by the
press, but by the professors. Rare for a festschrift,
all Quinn’s introductory essayist criticise Fennell.
By that I mean “constructive” criticism.
Stranded in the wake of deconstruction, belletrists
who dare to consider the person along with his page
remain few; while half of the eight contributors list
their academic posts, their examination of Fennell’s
positions remains blessedly free of jargon. Certainly
unfashionable: this author expects that a common reader
of the Sunday paper (for which he long wrote, near
the belly of the metropolitan beast: cf. Joyce’s
‘Aeolus’ chapter) understands his arguments
as well as the pointy-headed dreamers and faction-fighters
among us. (Find his journalism collected from the
Sunday Press, 1969-71: ‘Build the Third
Republic’ compressed in columns, the blueprints
gathered; their applications, as we will see, barely
tried. For better? Worse?)
This
appeal to actual experience grounds Fennell’s
attack. All of the West’s remedies for what ails
us post-Hiroshima have failed. Consumerism poisoned
collectivism. Pragmatism doomed idealism. The chainstore
plagued the cornershop. Ireland’s what Connolly
warned: new boss same as the old boss. Fittingly,
his collected longer essays bore the title of “Heresy.”
Who cares about ethics? Individual desires overwhelm
any collective effort. The ideals of the Easter Proclamation
echo only as tinny rhetoric. O’Connell street
sells lingerie across from the GPO. Better, as John
Waters observes, that the media prop up Fennell as
the stock reactionary wheeled out against Dublin 4’s
repertory of sensible liberals and sensitive hedonists.
For
RTÉ’s never neutral. No more than any
of us. We all need a schoolmarm now and then to call
us on it. While many of the contributors to Quinn’s
book delineate their own erasures and corrections
to Fennell’s sketches of a new Ireland, they
agree that he challenges them to reevaluate their
own (often sensible liberal) assumptions. For Fennell
damns our culture as one of lies. Not that the previous
culture of Catholicism, authority, and coherence lacked
in abuses. But that what, after half-a-century of
sport within the ruins of WWII, we have substituted
has left us so bereft of a moral or spiritual compass.
We, raised in the only playground most of us have
known, now cavort among not flowers with friends but
near lorries and alone. In the rubble, we wander.
Recall Johnny Rotten’s sneer: ‘we’re
the flowers in your dustbin’. Not that the Queen
noticed. And we don’t care.
1999’s
The Postwestern Condition summarises his assault
upon our soundbite appetite. Our post-modern ennui
may titillate glitterati and tenure literati, but
among average folks--unanchored, regarded only as
cash generators and vote producers by the conglomerates-we
supposedly blessed of the free world have thrown away
our pearls and turned supersized swine. Crowding like
the Gadarene pigs over the cliff, we flee the corrective
voice. (My gospel allusions underline Fennell’s
post-Vatican II stint as theological editor, following
university in Bonn and foreshadowing his 1989 return
at the GDR’s collapse: in a forthcoming essay
I will give his Euro-Christian foundation for his
nationalist/republican critique more attention than
Quinn’s brief collection grants.) Our postwar
generation finds not a socialist paradise or a democratic
amity but a ‘black hole of amorality’ left
by the bomb: we know we’re being lied to and
don’t give a damn anymore. Still, we refuse to
deny any gratification. What should we do?
Here,
Fennell’s own attempts in the 60s and 70s show
how difficult it is for Irish nation-builders to divert
the capitalist bulldozer. The Cearta Sibhialta
movement in the Cois Fharraige gaeltacht, inspired
by “blow-in” Fennell, showed both gains
(RnG, An Spidéal’s economic
tourism, a renewed musical and cultural vigour, and
confidence among native speakers) and losses (more
“blow-ins,” holiday bungalows littering
the coast between Barna and Carna, Fennell’s
own marital separation, and a sense that his neighbours
and he would never ‘only connect’.) Bob
Quinn, another newcomer who stayed, comments tellingly
that when he asked Fennell why he (in the early 80s)
was leaving Conamara after fifteen years of agitation,
he responded only: ‘too much sacrifice makes
a stone of the heart’.
The
human cost of political struggle continues in other
contributors’ reflections. Risteárd Ó
Glaisne pinpoints his friend ‘Deasún’s’
stances made him ‘weary of predictable dissent’.
For readers of The Blanket, the relevance of
our journal’s existence as a vehicle of ‘protest
and dissent’ merges with critique by — and
of — Fennell. Ó Glaisne frowns on Fennell’s
over and underreliance on defining his offensive against
consumerism. Superficiality and hypocrisy — if
Fennell cares so much about Gaelic, why so little
has he produced as gaeilge? — weaken his
prophetic power. No wonder, then, that he becomes
only another raving John the Baptist. As an Irish-speaking
Cork Protestant, Ó Glaisne rejects Fennell’s
reflexive genuflections to “true” Christian
ideals as if found only within a Euro-Catholicism
— this vanity, Ó Glaisne relates, reveals
his longtime comrade’s intellectual and emotional
immaturity: a voice crying to nobody much in the wilderness.
Certainly
rare for such a collection celebrating the thinking
of one’s friend. But consider that seven contributors
all point out Fennell’s shortcomings — and
that Fennell himself has been generous in admitting
his own tentative and evolving viewpoints. Here again,
a connection to The Blanket. How many of you
have defied the orthodox, the conformist, the popular
platitude? How easily have we all surrendered to the
path of least resistance? After decades, like Fennell,
of taking up arms against the foe, how long can we
hold out? How tempting, we all know, to give in to
the majority view, the popular vote, the spotlight.
Who of us would want to be booed off Gay Byrne? Not
having our ideas taken seriously, our essays ignored,
our voices caricatured: isn’t our effort here-differing
ideologically as it is with Fennell’s to be sure-part
of the same hoarse protests against the emperor’s
court?
Mary
Cullen’s suggestion to Fennell enriched by her
feminism can help us too. If any progress towards
a more equitable republic still beckons, she counters,
we must reject our oppressors’ spin doctoring.
Confronting the adversarial media model that ridiculed
Fennell, she proposes:
For
dialogue and debate to have a real chance of influencing
the value systems and thinking of society we need
forums where as many perspectives as possible are
assured of being listened and responded to, though
not necessarily of winning assent; where argument
and disagreement are not seen simply as battles
between sectional interests but as part of a process
that hopes to develop a form of consensus which
could actually contribute to public policies which
genuinely tried to further the interests of all
the people. (Cullen, “Making Argument Work:
The Case of Feminism.” In Toner Quinn, ed.
Desmond Fennell: His Life and Work [Dublin:
Veritas, 2001], p. 103.)
Now,
isn’t Cullen’s prescription only another
nostrum among those touted by Dr Fennell’s traveling
media show to skeptical crowds? Well, perhaps her
alternative medicine provides the holistic cure. If
our moral stance will outweigh the mass of the consumerist
leviathan, we must find — like Archimedes looking
for the fulcrum point to so as to force his globe-tipping
lever — our own platform from which to strain
and push.
As
Fennell told his students: ‘Pray to God for an
obsession. Once you’ve got that, you’ve
got something to write about’ And work for. But,
will others listen? As his own 2000 combative radio
interview with the RTÉ’s Carrie Crowley
documents at this collection’s close, his own
prickly nature leaves him perpetually unwilling to
give ground to the opposition. He gained infamy for
his 1991 scolding (revised in Heresy) of Séamus
Heaney’s gnomic cosiness instead of making of
his poetic power a fulmination against injustice in
the North. Now, this is dangerous, as literary critics
(post-Hiroshima at least) have been schooled: the
authorial fallacy of mixing creator into creation,
author into text. Heaney chose after 1975’s North
to retreat, literally and poetically, away from direct
confrontation with the overtly political. Fearing
the label of Ulster poet and the limits of regionalism,
he moved to Dublin and later Harvard. And in 1991,
recall, Fennell could not predict his own defeat and
exile a few years hence after his latest attempt to
publish his own mixing of American diary and anti-WTO
screed. Compare Fennell’s repeated and corresponding
lack of acclaim with the audience largely gained by
Heaney’s Wordsworthian craft. While I agree with
Fennell that other more deserving Celtic bards lack
the plaudits too quickly awarded the Derry oracle,
I add that Fennell’s naysaying perhaps lost him
typically more readers than Heaney gained in the exchange!
Séamus would be much more welcome than Desmond
on the RTÉ soundstage: Fennell’s grudge?
While
not a laureate but a critic, Fennell sounds guilty
of protesting too much here. Still, I admire his willingness
to again speak truth to power, when it emanates not
only from Dublin 4 but the well-endowed chair of rhetoric
at Harvard. Christopher Hitchens, in Letters to
A Young Contrarian, opines that those in power
really don’t need to be reminded by the hoi
polloi about the truth. They already know better,
and do worse. So, back we are again at scratching
the surface of ivory towers. Fennell’s hop up
again onto the weary nag for another assault may be
more an atavistic reflex than a strategy by now. Maybe
the plains of La Mancha and Sperrin mountains (from
where Fennell’s grandfather, a native Irish-speaker,
emigrated to Belfast) have more in common than we
learned in geography. Perhaps they raised stubborn
holdouts, crusty visionaries pelted lifelong by the
boors. Let me explain.
For,
Bob Quinn muses, maybe his fellow Dubs shouldn’t
have been so surprised by Fennell’s spat with
‘famous Séamus’-who has been known
to be less than amicable himself, from Quinn’s
testimony [among others as I’ve heard tell!].
Perhaps Fennell’s Belfast infancy and frequent
trips back from his parent’s adopted Dublin to
his grandparents’ home on the Upper Newtownards
road, Quinn wonders, mirror stubborn localisms even
within their one island. Fennell never backs down
— an honest Ulsterman squaring off against the
emperor’s Spenserian ‘rugheaded kern’
tamed as its patronised poet — and that’s
why he remains himself. Some of the O Neill’s
gave in to the first Elizabeth, some refused, some
kept switching sides. Fennell refused even a token
submission. Sure, maybe mistaken by the crowd as a
jester rather than its soothsayer, but irredeemably
a creature loyal to his native habitat. This matches
Fennell’s attraction to the immediate rather
than the intangible. Striking back against empire.
Small is beautiful.
Remember
what this collection nearly overlooks: his campaign
as “Freeman” in An Phoblacht in the
early 70s for Eire Nua. His assistance in drafting
this controversial policy and advertising it throughout
Ireland has been neglected, even in Toner Quinn’s
collection. It does, however, include his influence
among those eager to decentralise and collectivise
the rural west against Dublin. We see in today’s
plans to place town hubs around the island a fulfillment
of his recommendations for preservation of our Irish
past and a revitalisation for its livable future.
Fennell, perhaps too much, cherishes ‘all the
children of the nation equally’. For this he
has received the equal disdain of all of them.
In
Beyond Nationalism and The Revisionism of
Irish Nationalism he took on the revisionists
while elaborating upon his 70s thinking. In the 90s,
perhaps exhausted by preaching to too few even in
the choir, he expanded into reassessments of the West’s
malaise. Fennell always tries to integrate his diagnosis
of Ireland’s malady into an analysis of the wider
symptoms afflicting not only the West but the East.
He began his career with a 1959 travelogue, Mainly
in Wonder: Berlin to Tokyo by way of Belgrade and
Burma. His latest work returns to this panoramic
view. What to do once provided for even from cradle
to grave — as for the lucky of us in a Euro-American
multinational slumber — inspires The Turning
Point: My Swedish Year and after. Comfort discomforts
him. He replaces rhetoric with the real, and then
he seeks to reconstruct from his local observations
a broader framework. While his draftsmanship often
meets with disdain, he eschews the party line for
the possible dream. For republicans and loyalists,
his pioneering analysis of a federalist system in
which both ‘Ulster British’ and ‘Six
County Irish’ could cooperate — while derided
by the Adams camp [see my
review upon Moloney’s attention in his A
Secret History of the IRA to this scheme] deserves
respect for its attention to both communities within
an Irish polity at a time (1973) when both peoples’
aspirations had been hijacked by opportunists and
nicked by the unscrupulous.
Against
such destruction, contrast Fennell’s championship
of the underdog. Too often the legacy of Tone and
1916 we hear honoured by their supposed successors
in speeches not. deeds. Fennell dares to remind us
Irish of this. He dedicates Heresy to Bernadette
McAliskey, and for its colophon quotes Pearse’s
reminder that in love of humanism beats the heart
of a sincere nationalist. As if this isn’t damaging
enough against the media norm, Quinn gets in another
dig. ‘Fennell’s roots are in the plain-spoken,
confrontational North’. No wonder the South’s
‘dissembling’ attitudes produced hecklers.
Still,
for the professional protester, as Fennell’s
many quixotic jousts (born 1929, writing since 1958)
have shown, one tires when the windmills still stand.
We need to learn from Fennell’s example the strategies
which produce results for the everyday Irish and those
which will not move more than the fanatical or the
deluded to pointless efforts. The Blanket —
we all agree — exists to direct debate. It shares
the constructive manner of those colleagues of Fennell
who admire his visionary creations while they lament
their elusive slip beyond the grasp of ordinary mortals.
Fennell, like many a past critic of Ireland, lives
now in self-exile. His neighbours, those to whom his
exhortations are addressed, still remain on his island.
For all of his concern for reassembling a better Republic,
its implementation, even by an educated Dubliner fluent
in Irish (among five languages!) charged with the
enthusiasm of the 60s trying to motivate his neighbours
to collective efforts, failed. Grassroots directions
even as carefully drawn in Eire Nua could guide
those ‘of little property’ very little towards
an Tríú Réabhlóid.
Like
Pearse once out the door of his Ros Muc cottage, those
Fennell sought to unite regarded their patriot with
more distance than warmth. In Carna, Bob Quinn witnesses,
the natives regarded his rejection of the fatalistic
and the slapdash as ‘un-Irish’. Nevertheless,
Fennell’s dogged pursuit of the ideal plan and
the practical exertion from which to excavate a fresh
Irish nation endures. Quinn’s quintessential
image of his friend? Chipping away at the Conamara
granite soil, for hours, to dig into its implacable
face a channel for a bit of water preserved to sustain
Quinn’s thin garden.
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