Desmond Fennell (Irish writer)

Desmond Fennell
Born	Desmond Carolan Fennell 1929 Belfast, Northern Ireland
Occupation	Philosopher, writer, linguist
Nationality	Irish
Education	Belvedere College University College Dublin Trinity College, Dublin Bonn University
Spouse	Miriam Duggan

Desmond Carolan Fennell (born 1929) is an Irish writer, cultural philosopher and linguist, whose most frequent form of writing is the essay. Throughout his career Fennell has repeatedly departed from prevailing norms. In the 1950s and early 1960s, with his extensive foreign travel and reporting and his travel book Mainly in Wonder, he departed from the norm of Irish Catholic writing at the time. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, in pioneering new approaches to the partition of Ireland and the Irish language revival, he deviated from political and linguistic Irish nationalism, and with the wide philosophical scope of his Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle against Provinciality in the Modern World, from contemporary Irish culture generally.

Fennell has opposed the West's predominant neo-liberal ideology. In 1991, in a pamphlet on the poet Seamus Heaney, Fennell challenged the prevalent critical view of Heaney as a poet of the first rank; in 2003 he wrote a small book revising the standard account of European history, and in 2007, arising from his lifelong interest in European painting, his essay Beyond Vasari’s Myth of Origin offered a new version of its early history.

Desmond Fennell was born in Belfast in 1929. He was raised in Dublin from the age of four—first in East Wall, and then in Clontarf. His father was a Sligoman who lost his job during the American Great Depression but who prospered in Dublin in the wholesale grocery business. His mother was the daughter of a Belfast shopkeeper. His grandfather was a native Irish-speaker from the Sperrins in County Tyrone.

In Dublin, Fennell attended the Christian Brothers O'Connell School and Jesuit Belvedere College. In the Leaving Certificate Examination he obtained first place in Ireland in French and German and was awarded a scholarship in classical languages at University College Dublin, which he entered in 1947. While completing a BA in history and economics, he also studied English and Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin.

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