Meon Gaelach: A Statement of Aims for Reviving Irish Intellectualism
The following first appeared on the Substack ‘Creeve Rua’ and is syndicated with the permission of the author.
Reviving a space for Irish intellectual life
‘In 1972, in a Thomas Davis lecture on `The Gaelic League Idea', Professor Sean Ó Tuama of UCC described the objective result of that condition:
“In business, science, engineering, architecture, industry, law, home-making, agriculture, education, politics and administration from economic planning to PAYE, from town planning to traffic laws the vast bulk of our thinking is derivative. One doubts if we have added anything of real importance to sociological or theological, philosophical or aesthetic thought ... Our television is to a great extent either derivative or Anglo-American … Our reading materials, in particular our quality books and journals, are virtually all of Anglo-American provenance. Not remarkably, our opinions reflect quite closely what we read.”’ - How Ireland thwarts its creative thinkers.
Every Friday from now on, I will be publishing my own translations of previously untranslated works of Gaelic intellectual thought. These can be poems, pamphlets, extracts from longer form books, articles, etc — with a brief word on their significance introducing each text. The one theme tying these works together is they are representations of what innovative and independent Irish thinking looks like in practice, unbelholden to constraints of the Anglicised thinking which dominates the country.
Put more succinctly, what Meon Gaelach will attempt to complete the goal Desmond Fennell set out in his body of work, but particularly in Beyond Nationalism, in establishing a future Ireland which allow space for Gaelic studies and Irish ideas— meaning an Irish School of Literary Criticism, an Irish School of Economics, etc.
Notice this project is not necessary polemical, avoiding what, in my view, is a plague on many dissidents, and counter-cultural thinkers, who know how to whine about what is going wrong, but are incapable of offering what an alternative, positive policy and cultural apparatus would look like.
In one passage, Fennell describes previous texts and thinkers that he would include in his bibliography of Gaelic or independent Irish studies such as Seán De Fréine, Charles McCarthy, Francis Stuart, among others. For the purposes of this discussion, I will quote from Fennell, bemoaning how Irish intellectuals of recent years have had to publish outside of the country, due to the provinciality of Irish intellectual spaces, not giving room for independent Irish thinking:
‘Rare the person in Ireland in the last ten years who has read an Irish review of —to name a few random examples—Brian O’Connor’s Adorno or Richard Kearney’s On Stories: Thinking in Action or The God Who May Be or Gerard Casey’s Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State or William Desmond’s Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion, Philosophy and Art or Philip Petit’s A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency and Rules, or James Mackey’s Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and its Future among Religions or Christopher Cowley’s Reconceiving Medical Ethics or Dermot Moran’s Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences —all of them published abroad because either their authors live abroad or no Irish publisher would take them.
The underlying fact is that an aversion to creative thought about the big questions by Irish thinkers pervades Irish society. Tacitly we work to confirm Matthew Arnold’s depiction of the “Celtic” peoples in his Study of Celtic Literature as ever so imaginative but thoughtless.’ - ‘Ireland needs an intellectual life’, Desmond Fennell.
The first edition of Meon Gaelach will be a translation of Máirtín Ó Direáin’s Easter Rising 25th anniversary poem dedicated to James Connolly, published shortly after this post.