Brendan O'Regan - Irish Innovator, Visionary and Peacemaker by Brian O'Connell Cian O'Carroll (review)

Abstract

because we obviously care about our reputation and I’m not sure government cares about that as much’. The author argues that Zuckerberg sees himself ‘in an evolutionary line from tribes, to cities, then nations to the next phase facilitated by Facebook; a global community’. According to Zuckerberg we will then be able to spend our time ‘enjoying and interacting with each other and expressing ourselves in new ways’. If he believes all this tosh, he’s an idiot; if he doesn’t, he’s a hypocrite. Either way, if we are to retain our humanity and our democracy, we need to resist. A thorough understanding of this book would in itself constitute a major act of resistance. John Fanning lectures at the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School in Dublin. Brendan O’Regan – Irish Innovator, Visionary and Peacemaker, Brian O’Connell with Cian O’Carroll (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2018), xiv + 535 pages. Throughout the entire reading of this book, I was particularly struck by the extraordinary energy and goal-driven focus of Brendan O’Regan, a man who might have ended up as a good and attentive but ultimately forgettable country solicitor (an early consideration of his), but who instead became and remains a very memorable man of Clare, who has left a remarkable legacy for his home county and for his country in at least three distinct and apparently unrelated fields. Shannon Town and the entire complex that is Shannon is in no small part due to Brendan O’Regan’s dedication; later, he made major contributions to the working out of peace, reconciliation and a new measure of cooperation between communities in the north and the south of this island; and when he was in his mid-seventies, starting in 1993, he initiated the establishment of a village-sized organisation to help promote the wellbeing of and employment for people in Newmarket-on-Fergus, an enterprise that is also still thriving. All in all, a fully lived life. In his later life, he received many well deserved honours – doctorates from three Irish universities, a UK honour for his peace-work and he was made Clareman of the Year and a Freeman of Limerick. With all this, he was a Studies • volume 109 • number 433 107 Spring 2020: Book Reviews Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 107 Studies_layout_SPRING-2020.indd 107 27/02/2020 13:59 27/02/2020 13:59 well-grounded family man, dedicated to his wife Rita, with whom he had five children and in whose company he most truly relaxed and enjoyed himself and them. He remained devoted to his Catholic faith, which he lived faithfully and fully. He lived until he was almost ninety-two years old, predeceased by his wife, but active and interested all through. It must have been very difficult not to turn this fine biography into a hagiography. Yet the author has kept a fair balance, and if he errs in taking the side of his protagonist now and then, he does not do so excessively or in a way that is unfair to any other actor on the stage. And it was a well populated stage, with many well-known national and international figures having a part to play. O’Regan’s magnum opus, as regards his national contribution, is the story of Shannon and it is here that O’Connell portrays the drama in full flow, a drama full of action and people, hopes and expectations raised, opposed, dashed, persisted in and succeeding in ways not foreseen. The young O’Regan met two major players in the story when he was manager of the Stephen’s Green Club in Dublin in 1943: Sean Lemass, then Minister for Industry and Commerce, and John Leydon, secretary of the department. O’Regan was proposed for and duly appointed to the position of catering manager in Foynes, where plans were afoot to take over this function from the British in what was then ‘the busiest landing point in Europe for transatlantic seaplanes’.1 He arrived in early 1944. O’Connell gives an indication of the uniqueness of Foynes: ‘In no sense was Foynes a normal civilian airport. All passengers … were travelling on war...