Professor Michael Cronin’s launch speech for the new book The Radical Thinking of Desmond Fennell, edited by Toner Quinn and Jerry White, at The Sandymount Hotel, Dublin, on 6 June 2025. The launch took place as part of the annual Desmond Fennell Summer Seminar, organised by Gerard O’Neill and Finbarr Bradley.

In 2022 the independent publisher, Canongate in Edinburgh, published a book entitled Imagine a Country: Ideas for a Better Future. The book was an updated version of a title which originally came out on the eve of the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014. In this book the editors—Jo Sharp and Val McDermid—invited a wide range of Scottish writers, intellectuals, and civil society activists to imagine a different Scotland. Their introduction begins:

Imagine a country…

Close your eyes and put your fingers in your ears and shut out the angry chaos for a moment. Now take a deep breath and imagine a country you want to live in, a country you wish existed, a country where you’d feel truly at home.

The editors justified these imaginings on the grounds that if ‘we’re going to enact change, the first step is to imagine it. If we can’t imagine a different way of being, if we can’t imagine a different future, how can we reach escape velocity from an unbearable present?’

Des Fennell must be numbered among those thinkers in 20^th century Ireland who was consistently committed to imagining different ways of being for a country that he loved so deeply and whose wellbeing was so central to his public interventions and published writings. He was, as he noted repeatedly in his essays, a child of the Irish Revolution, an inheritor of the movement for radical change that galvanised the Irish nation into being in the early part of the last century. He was fond of quoting Douglas Hyde who, in his evidence to the Royal Commission on University Education in 1902, described the Gaelic League as an ‘intellectual movement’ and the League’s aim as making ‘Ireland intellectually interesting for the Irish.’ Des Fennell was unashamed in his repeated articulation of the importance of thinking in the process of social and political transformation. His basic contention was that if you do not come up with your own ideas, you are condemned to live in a world created by the ideas of others.

Jean-Paul Sartre in his A Plea for Intellectuals defined the classic intellectual as a ‘technician of practical knowledge’, someone who applies universal practices to particular situations. The scientists working on the Manhattan Project used their knowledge of the universal laws of nuclear physics to build an atomic bomb. The ‘classic intellectual’ has become the contemporary ‘expert,’ the individual who draws on a specific body of universal knowledge to offer advice or supervise the implementation of a particular policy. The revolutionary intellectual, on the other hand, is an individual who intervenes in the public sphere and who operates in the broader moral sphere of determining what are the desirable, overall goods for a society or what set of values might arguably contribute to its flourishing. It is the revolutionary intellectual who can say that there is nothing wrong with the science of the Bomb but everything wrong with using it in the first place.

Des Fennell subverted Sarte’s neat distinctions in that he was a thinker who operated both at the level of broad humanist probings of the present and future direction of Irish and global societies and at the level of the ‘practical knowledge’ needed to illuminate particular situations. Reading through the essays in the book, it is remarkable how prescient Des Fennell was in imagining the arrangements for power sharing in Ireland or sketching out the embryonic shape of a new archipelagic relationship between Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England or detailing the institutional relationships necessary for the proper maintenance and development of the Irish language. One of Des Fennell’s most crucial allies in debate was the clarity of his prose and the pointedness of his polemic. For someone who was particularly keen to champion native traditions of thought, his writings were in the sparklingly corrosive lineage of Jonathan Swift, John Toland and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. Rereading a number of the essays and prose extracts is to be reminded again and again of the alacrity and vividness of Des Fennell’s prose.

I litir a sheol Seosamh Ó Cuaig chuig an nuachtán Inniu mí na Márta 1969 do scríobh sé an méid seo leanas: ‘I mo thuairimse níl duine ar eolas ag Gluaiseacht na Gaeilge faoi láthair níos tábhachtaí ná Deasún Fennell—sin cé nach bhfuil sé ceangailte, chomh fada agus is eol dom, le heagraíocht Ghaeilge ar bith. Is é an t-aon duine amháin é a bhfuil plean aige; plean ar fiú plean a thabhairt air.’ D’aithin Ó Cuaig láithreach i smaointeoireacht a chara go raibh sí go hiomlán difriúil ón ghnáth-dhíoschúrsa maidir le cúrsaí teanga sa Ghaeltacht mar chuir Fennell an bhéim ar phobal seachas ar theanga, ar chumhacht seachas ar chanúint, agus dhiúltaigh sé glan glacadh leis an maoithneachas idéalaíoch a bhí á chleachtadh ag cuid mhaith de lucht na hAthbheochana ag an am sin. Feicimid anois cinnte cuid de na torthaí praicticiúla a tháinig ón bplean sin, is é sin a rá, Raidió na Gaeltachta, Údarás na Gaeltachta, nó Iarchonnacht mar aít lárnach i bhforbairt na dtionscal cruthaíocha. Tig linn a rá gur thig Deasún Fennell go rí-mhaith an tábhacht a bhaineann lenár dteanga dúchais ach ba thábhachtach dó i gcónaí nach mbeadh an teanga scartha amach ón gcomhthéacs geilleagrach nó ó struchtúir na cumhachta i bpobal faoi leith.

Tom Moylan, the Founding Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick, in a recent publication was unsparing in his presentation of a sombre present: 

It’s not yet the worst of times, but things are worse every day. It’s far from the best of times. Harm abounds everywhere. The interrelated crises that have been with all of us for a good while are nearing conjunctural explosion. Ecologically, planetary nature (including humanity) is facing a downward spiral of near-total destruction.

Des Fennell, who in ‘The Postwestern Condition,’ analysed a number of contributory factors to the ‘interrelated crises’, and experienced the brutal indifference of what he calls ‘mindlessness’ in public life in Ireland, never abandoned his belief in that central calling, of what he defined as ‘Intellect directed benevolently, critically and creatively to the condition of the Irish nation.’ In a country where our young people are experiencing record levels of anxiety and depression, where Ireland has been described recently as ‘the loneliest place in Europe,’ and where the right to a roof over one’s head has been sacrificed to the voodoo policies of speculative finance, Des Fennell’s writings on the centrality of self-government, the importance of local democracy, the value of community, the transformative potential of civic nationalism, the precious legacies of faith communities, and the enabling genius of native language and thought are more relevant than ever. In his deliberations, he is a member of what the American critic, Frederic Jamieson, described as the ‘Party of Utopia’ defined as ‘a long red line of those who will not settle for less than justice and freedom for everyone on an ecologically healthy earth.’ Toner Quinn and Jerry White are to be congratulated for their judicious selection of Des Fennell’s writings which record not only the lived experience of being a public intellectual in modern Ireland but which provide such a rich repository of arguments, analyses, and suggestions for present and futures debates on the island and further afield. Des Fennell’s description of the ostracism and isolation that he was subject to in the latter part of his career will be all too familiar to those of us who lived through those leaden years of doctrinal absolutism and metropolitan disdain for the mere natives and their strange ways. Ideas, however, represent their own vindication. The spite of his critics speaks only to the laboured grudges of a forgotten past but the force of his writing speaks powerfully to the coming generations on our island home. In this sense, Des Fennell is not only a supremely articulate advocate of the transformative project of the Irish Revolution. Globally, he stands with decolonising intellectuals from the Caribbean to the African continent to South Asia who have sought to bring justice, dignity, and a sense of purpose to the lives of those caught up in the long aftershadow of the colonial.  

In recent times, a book that has been generating a great deal of debate in the mediasphere, is the Dutch thinker Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition. The subtitle doesn’t beat around the bush, ‘Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference.’ We can safely say with respect to the legacy of Des Fennell that not only was his thinking characterised, at all times, by the highest forms of moral ambition but that he never wasted his talent and that he has already, and will continue, thanks to this wonderful collection, to make a difference.

Comhghairdeas ó chroí do chuile dhuine a bhí páirteach sa tionscnamh éachtach seo.

Professor Michael Cronin holds the 1776 Chair of French at Trinity College Dublin and is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He previously co-edited the cultural magazine Graph and he is the author of many books including Translation and Identity, Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene, An Ghaeilge san Aois Nua/Irish in the New Century and An Ghaeilge agus an Éirceolaíocht – Irish and Ecology. He also co-edited Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy. Visit https://www.tcd.ie/French/people/michaelcronin.php.

The publication of The Radical Thinking of Desmond Fennell was made possible through the generous support of the Fennell family, Finbarr Bradley and Gerard O’Neill. Purchase a copy here.