The death has taken place of the writer and public intellectual Dr Desmond Fennell, who was aged 92.
In a statement, President Michael D Higgins said Fennell "embraced life in all its glory and its challenges" and would be remembered by many for his contribution towards the establishment of Raidió na Gaeltachta.
Born in Belfast and raised in Dublin, Fennell travelled extensively from a young age and over the course of a long career as a writer and thinker, explored a range of subjects including the Irish language, Irish culture, nationalism, partition, western civilisation, and Catholicism.
At the age of 21 he went to live in Germany and five years later went to the Soviet Union from where he wrote a series of articles for The Irish Times, believed to be the first reports by an Irish journalist from the communist state for an Irish publication.
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The books he wrote over the course of his career included Mainly in Wonder (1959), which arose from his travels in the Far East; The Changing Face of Catholic Ireland (1968), and Third Stroke Did It: The Staggered End of European Civilisation (2012), where he predicted that the senselessness of contemporary, consumerist western culture meant its inevitable demise, to be replaced by a newer, more coherent one.
Essayist, linguist, broadcaster, lecturer, newspaper columnist and author, Fennell was a strong believer in the humanising effect of making up your own mind, rather than accepting the viewpoint of any orthodoxy.
He married linguist Mary Troy, and they had five children. During the late 1960s the family lived in Connemara, from where over the following years Fennell wrote an influential column for the Sunday Press.
No stranger to controversy, his 1991 pamphlet on Seamus Heaney angered many of the poet's admirers, while an article in The Irish Times in 2008, where he wrote that the white race in the West was a dying breed, likewise provoked some strong responses.
In his statement, the President said it was with great sadness that he had learned of the death of Fennell who, he said, had been a “profound supporter of language rights and meaningful regionalism”.
Fennell had brought “an originality of spirit and an informed independent analysis to bear on a wide range of topics,” Mr Higgins said.
“His writings on the Irish revolutionary period, and their central contention that the Irish revolution had not achieved its aims of cultural and economic independence, remain influential to this day, and will endure.”
He expressed his sympathies and those of his wife, Sabina, to Fennell’s partner, Miriam, and his extended family.
Fennell returned to Dublin in the 1980s, and lived in Malahide, where he died at home on July 16th. He is survived by his partner Miriam, children Oisín, Cilian, Natasha, Sorcha and Kate, son-in-law Ron, daughter-in-law Cathy, and grandchildren Sorcha, Jessica, Thal, Maya, Zach and Anú. His wife pre-deceased him.
