Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— December 2009 - January 2010
Ideas
for Irish intellectuals, not only
economists, to produce new thinking about the
present and future of Irish society and poli-
tics. In effect these are calls for Irish intellec-
tuals to help the nation by becoming creative
thinkers about the human condition and its
requirements in Ireland now. Such calls are
understandable in the present circumstances,
but they leave out of account the discouraging
environment for creative thinkers which our
Republic offers. There is no weekly or monthly
magazine of ideas in which Irish thinkers might
present their thought in a sustained manner
and debate with each other. And the existing
mass media have been engaged in an intellec-
tual dumbing down. Moreover, insofar as the
print media, radio and television publicise or
discuss Irish writing, they confine themselves
to prose fiction, poetry and plays; that is to say,
to fictive writing, to the neglect of creative writ-
ing about human reality in Ireland or generally.
State funding of creative writing practises a sim-
ilar discrimination. Aosdána, a state-funded,
self-electing assembly of creative individuals,
admits writers to membership among others.
To those writers who can prove their need, it
pays an annual stipend. But they must be fic-
tive writers; philosophical writers are excluded,
even if they are an Irish Fukuyama or Freud.
In the matter of book-publishing the
Arts Council discriminates similarly. On the
grounds that sales would likely be small, Irish
publishers are reluctant to accept works of
thought. To obviate a similar obstacle in the
case of prose fiction, plays or poetry, the Arts
Council subsidises the publication of such
works. But thinkers are left to fend for them-
selves, even if they are a new George Berkeley,
Edmund Burke or Douglas Hyde. A third state-
funded agency, Culture Ireland, is charged with
promoting and subsidising Irish culture inter-
nationally. In the year it subsidised
Irish cultural events. Insofar as these involved
Irish writers, once again all of them were of the
fictive kind. In other words, the events
included none—not one—in which Culture
Ireland subsidised an Irish thinker addressing
a foreign audience about some aspect of reality;
perennial, contemporary, or past. Thus Irish
culture is officially represented to the world as
a culture lacking any notable thought.
What all these discouragements, taken
together, seem to amount to is the Irish estab-
lishment and its subordinate tiers working to
confirm that very English notion, notably artic-
ulated by Matthew Arnold, of the imaginative,
thoughtless Celts: gifted entertainers of their
pensive Saxon masters cogitating on how to
run the world. Certainly our past history plays
a role in all this. The objective discouragements
which we impose on Irish creative thought both
grow out of, and reinforce, an inherited sub-
jective discouragement present in many Irish
people. To engage in sustained creative thought
requires confidence in one’s ability and right
to discover truth independently. But the leg-
acy of centuries-long mental colonisation of
the Catholic Irish—the great majority, the con-
quered ‘natives’—by the English, their colony
in Ireland, and the Catholic clergy, deprives
many of us of that dual confidence.
Generations of our ancestors were trained in
the belief that it was only ‘others’—the Anglo-
Irish, the English, the priests—who had that
ability and right: and this has left an inherited
ingrained mark in many. Thousands of those so
marked are active in the Republic’s mass media,
government, schools and seats of learning, and
subliminally delivering a similar doctrine, with
the privileged ‘others’ now located outside
Ireland. This goes far to explain why, when the
Catholic Irish ultimately achieved the chance to
call the shots, they created a republic that dis-
courages home-grown creative thought, and
makes its sustained expression a guerrilla enter-
prise. The resulting Irish life, conducted on the
basis of unscrutinised imported thinking, falls
short of adult life and resembles that of minors
guided by what adult elders elsewhere think.
As we witness, distressed, the swollen num-
bers of young suicides and the regular or occa-
sionally spectacular nights of self-destructive
youthful frenzy, a voice is sometimes heard say-
ing: ‘Now that in great measure our young peo-
ple lack the guidance previously given by the
Catholic Church operating through believing
parents, teachers, clergy and religious, what
a shame that we have not inherited a thought-
out philosophy of life and ethical behaviour,
with the result that we lack such a philosophy
now!’ What is not added is: ‘and do everything
we can to prevent its production’.
Dr Fennell’s latest book is Ireland After the End of Western
Civilisation, Athol Books online.
He is at www.desmondfennell.com
“There is no
weekly or monthly
magazine of
ideas in which
Irish thinkers
might present
their thought
in a sustained
manner”
We excel in fiction but repress philosophy and ethics
d e s m o n d f e n n e l l
PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES
