Desmond Fennell and Michael McDowell were not exactly ideological bedfellows.
“Waffle,” was McDowell’s scathing verdict when the pair debated Fennell’s book Heresy on an RTÉ chatshow in 1993. “[He] has from the vastness of his intellectual ivory tower decided that there’s a group of people called ‘south Dublin middle class’ who are keeping his views repressed … it’s all rubbish.”
As these two anthologies of their writing prove, however, the cultural philosopher (who died aged 92 in 2021) and the Progressive Democrats tánaiste turned independent senator (still going strong at 74) also had a few things in common.
Both emerge here as passionate Irish republicans with a broad vision of how unity should work. Both are still sometimes labelled as reactionary conservatives, a gross distortion of their actual views. Most importantly, both these volumes showcase original and creative minds with a refreshing willingness to swim against the tide of public opinion.
The Radical Thinking of Desmond Fennell opens with some stirring essays from the 1960s and 1970s in which he urged readers to be inspired by the Easter Rising’s “restorative humanism”. “My basic position from the start,” he later explained, “has been that ... the proper task of Irish intellectuals and policymakers is to think about the country, and transform it, in the spirit of the Irish Revolution.”
Toner Quinn and Jerry White have distilled Fennell’s hefty output (he produced 19 books, 13 pamphlets and hundreds of newspaper columns) into a 214-page “greatest hits” collection that shows how he followed his own advice.
It highlights his early campaigns for the Gaeltacht civil rights movement and a repopulation of Irish-speaking areas based on the Israeli Hebrew model. When the Troubles broke out, he advocated “a four-nation federation” of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales that would fully respect unionists’ British identity.
Much of Fennell’s work is quite abstract, but he occasionally used stylistic devices such as adopting the voice of an Orangeman or penning a sorrowful open letter to Margaret Thatcher following the death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
[ Desmond Fennell obituary: An independent thinker and purveyor of ideasOpens in new window ]
Fennell’s penchant for martyrdom is also fully on view. Throughout Ireland’s divorce and abortion culture wars, he railed against the “thought police [in] Dublin 4” (not so much a geographical location, more a state of mind) for pursuing individual freedoms over national projects.
Quinn and White have diplomatically omitted some of Fennell’s most colourful polemics, most notably his 1991 attack on “Famous Seamus” Heaney for supposedly not doing enough to support northern Catholics. Instead, we get slightly too much about his later “post-western civilisation” theory which claimed the world had entered an era of “moral chaos”.
It’s Fennell’s waspish, provocative but never glib commentaries on specifically Irish affairs that, as President Michael D Higgins noted after his death, “will endure and continue to inspire”.
Michael McDowell’s The Definite Article has an equally monumental feel, even though its author modestly describes it as a stop-gap publication while he works on a book about the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty.
It contains 452 pages’ worth of columns (many from this newspaper), legal analyses and summer school speeches, all written since 2009. The wide-ranging content is presented thematically rather than chronologically, with section headings such as Defence, Policing and Security, creating a manifesto-like effect.
Since McDowell has been a public figure for more than 40 years, his core beliefs are well known. “Middle Ireland does not want to be governed by the policy demands of the hard left,” he insists in one key passage about shifting Dáil alliances. “Middle Ireland is, in international terms, centre-right.”
Once nicknamed the Rottweiler, today he more closely resembles a watchdog of prudent public spending, our built environment and Bunreacht na hÉireann.
McDowell’s family links with the fight for Irish independence add weight to his historical pieces. The man whose grandfather (Gaelic League co-founder Eoin MacNeill) tried to call off the Rising in 1916 argues that it simply had to happen and explains why Michael Collins is his closest thing to a hero. Perhaps his most heartfelt running theme is that modern-day Sinn Féin betrayed that legacy, since anyone who glorifies Provisional IRA violence “has not even a smidgen of republican blood in [their] veins”.
As that line suggests, the former justice minister has never lost his flair for a brutal put-down. “Permit me to point out that the emperor is totally naked,” he declares at the end of a typically data-driven argument against the 2011 referendum on Oireachtas inquiry powers, one of several he has helped to defeat. His barrister’s skills are also used to coolly dissect the “quango-driven catastrophe” of MetroLink, “architectural barbarism” in Dublin city centre and Donald Trump’s “raw evil”.
The Definite Article could have benefited from more detail on sources and an index, but it certainly shows why the upcoming race for Áras an Uachtaráin will be duller without McDowell’s presence.
“ALWAYS BELIEVE IN YOUR IDEAS,” read a typically uncompromising email that Desmond Fennell sent to one of his editors. On this at least, he and Michael McDowell should have been in hearty agreement.
