[2] 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.

Influenced by the approaching fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising, he read the writings of the leaders of the Irish Revolution, identifying their project as "restorative humanism": a movement aiming to redefine Ireland as a democratically self-governing nation, economically self-sustaining, intellectually self-determining and culturally self-shaping.

Back in Ireland in 1961, Fennell outlined his Swedish experience in an essay "Goodbye to Summer"[5] which drew press reaction from Sweden to the US and was referred to by President Eisenhower.

In 1964 Fennell moved with wife and son to Freiburg, Germany, as assistant editor of Herder Correspondence, the English-language version of Herder-Korrespondenz; a Catholic journal of theology, philosophy and politics which played a leading "progressive" role during the Second Vatican Council.

[8] In those last pursuits he was inspired by Tom Barrington, director of the Institute of Public Administration and by the Breton political émigré in Connemara, Yann Fouéré.

[citation needed] In his column, and in the books The State of the Nation: Ireland Since the Sixties (1983) and Nice People and Rednecks: Ireland in the 1980s (1986), while continuing his "two ethnic identities" line on the North, he shifted focus to the consumerist liberalism he believed had risen to ascendancy in the Dublin media (associated with what Fennell perceived as the 'smug liberal elite' of Dublin 4).

He opposed the standard divorce legislation which the new liberals sponsored — preferring a choice of indissoluble and soluble marriage[2] — and their soft line on abortion and anti-nationalist historical revisionism as well.

In the view of Tom Garvin, lecturer in politics in University College Dublin, Fennell saw "the rise of the liberals" in Ireland as part of a process "which is turning the Republic back into a mere province of the United Kingdom".

In the early 1990s, Fennell recognised that the Irish Revolution had not achieved its national self-determining aim, especially in the intellectual, cultural and economic fields.

At the same time, in the face of what he termed "the consumerist empire", Fennell moved on from his communitarian social idealism,[12] and directed his efforts to a realistic, rather than idealistic, approach.

During it, he perceived that the US, since the justification of the atomic bombings of 1945 and what he believed to be a comprehensive new morality of the 1960s and 1970s, had rejected European civilisation, embarked on a new "post-western" course, and brought Western Europe along with it.

After a further 15 months in Seattle exploring this idea, he returned briefly to Dublin, published Uncertain Dawn: Hiroshima and the Beginning of Postwestern Civilisation, and in 1997 left for Italy to reflect further on this and related matters.

During those Italian years, Fennell developed his post-European view of the present-day West and in The Revision of European History (2003) explored how the course of Europe had culminated with an exit from it.

In 2008, Fennell created controversy in the letters columns with an article in The Irish Times on the decline of the West's white population.

Some of his final books were published by their Athol Press imprint, and he wrote articles for their monthly magazine, the Irish Political Review.