A lecture given at the first Desmond Fennell Summer Seminar on 14 June 2024 at Sandymount Hotel, Dublin 4, organised by Gerard O’Neill, Finbarr Bradley and James Bradshaw.

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Good morning everybody.

I’m delighted to contribute to this seminar on Desmond Fennell. Thank you Finbarr, James and Gerard for organising this event and for inviting me to speak.

Today I would like to explore the publishing dimension of Desmond Fennell’s work, including his ideas on book and magazine publishing, and I’d like to talk about my own publishing relationship with Desmond and discuss the current publishing scene.

I have been enjoying re-reading Fennell’s work over the past few weeks in preparation for this talk, and I want to thank Desmond’s son Oisín for providing me with books and essays that I didn’t previously have, and also for giving me access to some fascinating correspondences with publishers, which provide further light on Desmond’s publishing world.

I chose the topic of ‘Publishing Desmond Fennell’ for this seminar because for twenty years, publishing is almost entirely what Desmond and I spoke about: the publishing of his work; my publishing work; the role of book, magazine and digital publishing in Irish society; and the Irish publishing scene more generally. I have always felt that publishing was an important sub-theme in Desmond’s writing because bringing new thinking to the public conversation, and having those ideas discussed and developed – which was Desmond’s passion – is deeply reliant on the publishing industry. That is why Desmond was always pointing to it.

The fact that Irish publishing, however, could not support Desmond’s writing, particularly over the last few decades of his life, was, obviously, a source of great frustration to him. Over 19 books and 13 pamphlets, Desmond struggled to develop a sustainable relationship with an Irish book publisher and he moved through nine different publishers since the early 1980s. Six of his books since the 1990s were self-published or self-financed. When I came to know him in the late 90s and early 2000s, that was the current situation and it weighed quite heavily on him. 

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Before I get further into this publishing topic, however, I should say that my relationship to Desmond actually went deeper than publishing. 

He impacted my life before I was even born. My father, the film-maker Bob Quinn, came to know Desmond in the 1960s through RTÉ and Desmond’s 1969 Irish Times article on the Irish language and the Gaeltacht, ‘Revival or Not? The Courage to Decide’, was part of the reason that my parents in 1970 moved to Conamara, which was where I was born and where I live today. But his influence on my parents goes back even further than that. 

My mother likes to tell me that her very first date with my father was actually a Desmond Fennell book launch in 1968 – the book was titled The Changing Face of Catholic Ireland! 

And they really were the changing face of Catholic Ireland. They rejected their Catholic faith, left their jobs in Dublin, and moved to Conamara, turning up at the door of the Fennells in Maoinis near Carna on a November night in 1970 in a camper van with my elder brother just born. The Fennells and the Quinns became friends, and for the next decade both families lived in Conamara and our parents were involved in various ways with the Gaeltacht civil rights movement.

So I knew Desmond as a child. My memories of him were that he could be a serious man, sometimes unimpressed by us noisy Quinn children, and to be honest we were not always that fond of him either. I remember the Fennell family would come over to our house in An Cheathrú Rua and Desmond and my father would have serious conversations – half-arguing but inevitably agreeing – while us children played together, and our two families have always had a connection since then.

But when I was growing up, I had no idea who this person Desmond Fennell actually was, and it was a surprise to me – although perhaps it shouldn’t have been given my background – when in my early twenties I picked up his 1993 book Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern Ireland and I connected with his writing.

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Heresy not only pushed me in the direction of book and magazine publishing, but it also led me to eventually publishing Desmond and working with him.

My own background is in music. I’m a musician, I completed a degree in music and then started writing about music, and I was interested in the public conversation around Irish music during the Celtic Tiger because our traditional music had become an economic and political tool. As a musician, I didn’t think that should go unquestioned, but the public debate was thin and I couldn’t see a clear way of addressing that issue.

It was the final essay of Heresy,  ‘Intellect and National Welfare’, that gave me a way in. Desmond discussed what he called ‘the processing factor in the intellectual economy’ – the journey of how new ideas could go from the individual writer or thinker to an interested community of readers, how they were then discussed and debated in public, eventually reaching a wider public and then ultimately being accepted or rejected as a new way of thinking about a subject. This process was never perfect, and in Ireland it was often dysfunctional,  but I learnt that book and magazine publishing, and later of course digital publishing, were key to this process.

So in 1998, I decided to move to Scotland to study publishing, but just before I did, by pure coincidence, having not seen him since I was a child, I bumped into Desmond in a coffee shop in Dublin. I told him that I was reading Heresy, and he said ‘Ah, so you are finding out what’s going on in this country’, and I said ‘Yes, I am!’. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m available’, and with that he was gone.

While I was in Scotland, therefore, and he was in Italy, I started writing to him with my ideas on publishing, and he always responded. 

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The first topic that we discussed was what he called ‘national’ and ‘provincial’ book publishing. 

Provincial book publishing, in Desmond’s view, was when a country only published books about their own country. National publishing was when a country published books about their own country and about the world. If you know Desmond’s work from the 1990s, you will understand that this was when he began to develop his ‘post-Western civilisation’ theory and he was not writing about Ireland any more in any detailed way; he noticed that most Irish publishers published few books about the wider world when there wasn’t some Irish dimension.

His ‘postwestern civilisation’ theory suggested that we had entered a new era, or civilisation, after the Hiroshima bomb, but that we were in the ‘chaos period’, when the ‘rules’ of the new civilisation were still being figured out, and this is why the world didn’t make sense to people; he argued that eventually the money and the financial system we used to paper over this chaos would dry up and, ultimately, the general population would revolt. Desmond put forward those ideas in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was a challenging and bold  theory, but when the economic crash happened in 2008, followed by Trump and Brexit in 2016, and the rejection of liberal values that we have seen in recent years, it did seem that his work was incredibly prescient.

But he didn’t have any success with these ideas with book publishers. He had to go about publishing his work himself using vanity presses in London. I remember how determined he was to get his book The Postwestern Condition out into the world in 1999 before the new millennium. He thought it would have a big impact, and that in this new era there would be an appetite for discussing his thinking, but he was disappointed when that didn’t happen. 

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When I moved back to Ireland in 1999, we continued corresponding, and in 2001, when I was 27, I became the Managing Editor of Veritas Publications in Dublin, which was quite extraordinary because I had purposefully been raised with no religion by my parents. Veritas, of course, was owned by the Catholic Church. But that was of no consequence to me. I knew what I wanted to publish, which was new thinking on society, right at the height of the Celtic Tiger. 

Veritas had a brief to publish on social issues because of its Christian ethos, and I expanded that brief to publish books of new thinking. I covered topics such as racism, child poverty, housing, environmental issues, economics, education, drugs, violence, inequality, homelessness, Travellers, the Irish language – to which Kate Fennell contributed a fantastic essay – and even some on religion! And gradually I began to develop a situation where I could make the case to the Director of Veritas that Desmond Fennell would fit in our publishing list too, because he was, in a sense, writing books of social commentary too.

That is how the 2001 collection of essays Desmond Fennell – his life and work came about. Desmond was involved in that to a certain extent. I asked him for suggestions for names of contributors, but it wasn’t easy to get writers to agree. Ultimately, it contained essays by Joe Lee, Mary Cullen, John Waters, Nollaig Ó Gadhra, Risteárd Ó Glaisne, Brian Arkins, my father, and an interview with Desmond by Carrie Crowley. It was well received although it came out around the same time as the Twin Towers attacks and it was several weeks before a review appeared. With all the confidence and naivety of a 27-year-old, I wrote in the Preface: 

Given the range of subject matter which Desmond Fennell has tackled in a lifetime of writing, this book could have originated from almost any publisher in Ireland. … 

That was true in theory but unlikely. I continued:

Fennell’s work is the ideal fulcrum for good debate. It is unambiguous, erudite and profound, always challenging the conventional wisdom and suggesting alternative perceptions. It possesses, in a word, substance. And yet you will search Irish books and journals in vain for references to his work or any serious critique of his thought. … given that most of his books are now out of print, this publication was purely envisioned as an introduction, a starting point for those interested in the real world or simply curious about his work. It is certainly not meant to be the final word – and I do not think it will be.

Well, until today, almost twenty-three years later, it practically was the last word!

But it obtained some positive media coverage, which was usually unheard of for Veritas books, and so following Desmond Fennell – his life and work, Desmond sent me his new autobiographical book The Turning Point: My Sweden Year and After. To try and build support, I had Veritas send it out to two manuscript readers and, while one was curious, the other rejected it, partly because there were references to sex. Yet, because of the first book, Veritas agreed to let me publish The Turning Point using their infrastructure, design staff and distribution channels if Desmond paid the printing bill, which he did, and we issued it under his own imprint, Sanas. Again it received good media coverage, but you can already see the limits of Irish publishing, how quickly the doors close, and how he found it so hard to fit in, even with a religious publisher.

Two years later, when I published Vincent Twomey’s book The End of Irish Catholicism?, which engaged with some of Fennell’s ideas, I was then able to publish a response from Desmond in the form of a pamphlet, Savvy and the Preaching of the Gospel. Again, it was well reviewed, but when Desmond came to me with Cutting to the Point, his 2003 collection of essays, I knew I could not get it published because its range of topics was too broad and political for Veritas. I sent Cutting to the Point to the Liffey Press and thankfully they published it, but I can see from the correspondence that Oisín provided me with that it did not sell well at all – just 230 copies in the first year – and the publisher was disappointed and declined future submissions from Desmond. 

I left Veritas in 2004 to focus on my own music publishing, but continued to try and help Desmond to get published, yet we struggled. Desmond had to revert to self-publishing and eventually discovered the small publisher Athol Books in Belfast who published three of his books. I actually spoke to Jack Lane from Athol Books this week on the phone. Athol came out of the Irish Communist Organisation in Belfast and he said that they printed no more than a few hundred copies of each book between 2003 and 2009, that they were mainly distributed by mail order to members, and, apart from my phone-call this week, 15 years later, they got almost no response to the three books they published. I can see from Desmond’s correspondence that he was frustrated with Athol, but he did not have many other options.

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I often felt that while Desmond and I talked about publishing in theory, because I was in the book, magazine and digital publishing industry, I got to try out a lot of his ideas in practice, and I could see the limits of some of his thinking and also where he was correct. His opinion was that Ireland was lacking publishers who could support new creative thinking, and he didn’t view it as just about money, or the size of the small Irish market, he thought this was cultural, institutional and psychological, that there was, as he called it, an ‘Irish problem with thought’. He wrote about this on a number of occasions, in Cutting to the Point and in the essay  ‘On Thinking in Ireland’ from the 2012 book Third Stroke Did It – also self-published.

As evidence for his theory, he pointed to the cultural aspect: the overwhelming focus in our media on Irish fiction, poetry and drama, rather than creative thought or intellectual non-fiction Irish writing; secondly, the institutional factor, the fact that the Arts Council and Aosdána focused mainly on fiction and did not provide the same funding or recognition for, what he called, ‘creative thinking about the real’ or ‘social thought’; and the combined result of this was that there was no prominent book publisher for Irish intellectuals, nor was there  a regular, fully staffed, fully resourced magazine of ideas – print or digital – for people who practised the same kind of creative thinking that he did. 

This was a regular conversation between Desmond and I, but between 2005 and 2007, we actually got to test out this theory. Along with my music magazine, I decided I wanted to start a second broader magazine of ideas called Pimlico – Desmond writes about those conversations in his 2007 book About Behaving Normally (he was extraordinary for recording everything!). But what he doesn’t say in that book was that he was so enthused by the idea that he managed to secure a meeting for me, through the businesswoman Mary Finan, with the billionaire Dermot Desmond to try and raise the funds for starting this magazine of ideas. I can’t say I gave the best business pitch of my life, and so I didn’t convince Dermot Desmond, but the story illustrates how strongly Fennell felt about the role of publishing, and also the way he thought about enterprise. I continued to try and to raise the money in various others ways, and I was making progress, but it was all cut short with the economic crash of 2008.

Fennell’s theory was correct in part though. We found that there were more obvious routes for starting a music magazine or a literary journal than there were for starting a magazine of ideas and debate; we had to be much more creative, pursuing private funds and advice rather than institutional channels. 

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A second part of Desmond’s thinking on ‘the Irish problem with thought’ was his belief that there was a bias against creative thought and new ideas among book and periodical publishers. 

In 2002, he wrote to the editor of the Dublin Review, who had just refused his essay ‘The West’s Campaign for Mastery of the World’, and said:

I hoped to break the general rule that an Irishman, unless he self-publishes, cannot get new ideas published in Ireland … I think that, however much you disliked it, you’d have made the next issue of your journal an exciting one by publishing my ground-breaking essay and leaving it to others to point out its defects. The above mentioned rule would have been broken and a service done to Irish intellectual life. We both care about that, surely?

In fairness to the editor of the Dublin Review, Brendan Barrington, Fennell’s essay, which he self-published ten years later in Third Stroke Did It, was a complex and challenging piece of writing, and with my editor’s hat on, I think anyone would struggle to appreciate the ideas if they had not already read Fennell’s previous books on the ‘postwestern’ condition.

But later on, in a more detailed way, I again had the opportunity to test Fennell’s bias idea when I began lecturing in publishing at the University of Galway in 2008.

As part of my lecturing, I arrange two visits every year for the students of the MA in Literature and Publishing to Irish book publishers. At this stage, we have visited many of the major publishers in the country a number of times. It’s a fascinating visit because we get to hear first-hand what influences the decision-making of Irish commissioning editors. 

To be honest, I don’t hear a bias against creative thought – in fact, Irish publishers have very strong non-fiction lists because British publishers tend to draw away many of our fiction writers – but what do I hear is the extent to which they are influenced by Irish radio, particularly RTÉ Radio 1, and usually morning or afternoon radio. It means that if someone is a good communicator and has a story to tell, or something interesting to say on the radio, it’s quite possible that an Irish publisher will reach out to them about writing a book. Many of the publications in our bookshops come about that way. 

The advantage of this is that once the book is published, the Irish publisher can then go back to the researchers and producers of that radio programme and secure another appearance for their author and drive sales. As an example, there was an interview with RTÉ Radio 1 presenter Oliver Callan in the Irish Times last Saturday, and although he is only six months in his new job presenting the 9am show on Radio 1, he regarded it as a success that, and I quote, that ‘at least two of our guests have got book contracts [from their appearances]’. That’s the way book publishing works. 

But of course, as you might expect, this can lead to a circular process whereby our public conversation – our airwaves, and the breadth and width of our national discourse – becomes narrower. If a majority of people who get a book deal with an Irish publisher have to go through the screening process of day-time radio researchers and producers, then what does that mean for writers whose ideas don’t suit daytime radio? And what does it mean for smaller book publishers that are not taking their ideas from national radio? They are less likely to grow.

The one thing that interrupts this cyclical process between Irish media and Irish publishers is the influence of British publishers, whose well-resourced marketing teams and PR people can contact researchers and producers here repeatedly and get their authors on air. When Desmond writes in his ‘On Thinking in Ireland’ that when ‘occasionally contemporary thinkers do figure in the Irish mass media, they are foreigners who have won fame elsewhere’, it is not that that there is necessarily a bias against Irish thinkers, it is more because of the domineering influence of British publishers. 

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Despite the challenges Desmond faced in getting published, clearly he did manage to get a huge quantity of his writing published – 19 books and 13 pamphlets and countless articles and letters. When you consider what he was up against, he was exceptional in that regard. He would persist against the odds when so many of us would give up. And his letters to publishers that Oisín gave me illustrate that. 

Currently, myself and Jerry White, who is speaking later, with the support of the Fennell family, are planning to publish a book of selected writings by Desmond that would cover his early travel and Gaeltacht years right up to the postwestern years. The idea is to introduce his thinking to a new generation. It is at an early stage, but of course we are already thinking about what publishers might be suitable, and the challenge of finding a publisher is still there. Perhaps that proves Desmond’s arguments.

So given everything I have said about the publishing industry, and my experience working with Desmond, when I look back on those years working with him, I have to ask myself: what could we have done differently?

Do I think that, if he happened upon a major publisher with an experienced editor, could they have worked with him and wrestled his ‘postwestern’ ideas into a more accessible form for the wider public, and therefore gain him the recognition for what were some very prescient ideas? To be honest, I am not entirely sure how much advice Desmond would have taken. Among his letters I can see that he received a reader’s report in 2005 from the Lilliput Press that criticised his unorthodox approach of mixing commentary with diaries, notes and asides, and yet he ignored the comments and continued with it. He was very clear about what he wanted to say and how we wanted to say it, and he didn’t always take editorial advice.

In essays like ‘The West’s Campaign for Mastery of the World’, he worked right at the cutting edge of thought. You really have to think on another level to stay with him. In The Postwestern Condition, he provides two narratives that intertwine. Is it possible to make that kind of meta writing and thinking accessible to the wider public? Maybe not immediately.

The wider question that I want to leave you with is this: How can we create a situation where a young Desmond Fennell of the future could find a more favourable Irish publishing environment. What would that take? 

I was at the Dalkey Book Festival last night listening to three young people in their twenties full of ideas, but frustrated that they couldn’t get wider traction for their ideas. They reminded me of Desmond

I wanted to say to them: you are not alone – persist! But I could feel their disillusionment already. I think we need to create the spaces for these young thinkers, and publishing has an important role to play.

As Desmond would always say, the first step is understanding the situation. That is what I have tried to do today, by looking at his experience and the challenges Irish publishing faces. I think this seminar is an important step in breaking the silence around his work, and we now may have the beginnings of a new conversation. I think, and I hope, that Desmond would agree with me.

Thank you very much.