The death of Michael Noel Brennan in November 2024 brought to an end an extraordinary career that spanned almost sixty years and combined the complexities of two different disciplines - one the modern pursuit of mathematical computation in the digital age, the other the ages-old intricacy of what is known as insular art, or the creation of decorative patterns in illustration from the Celtic civilisation.

 

FAMILY BACKGROUND AND EARLY LIFE

Although he was a mathematician by profession from the 1960s onwards, one of Michael Brennan's early scholarly interests was the history of Celtic crosses, a subject close to his heart since the days when his father and uncle ran a well-known stone-carving business in Kilkenny.

Daniel Brennan had come to the city from nearby Bonnettstown, where his family had been farmers for several generations. He met Ellen O'Gorman (also known as Ellie) at a dancing-board in Threecastles. 

Daniel Brennan had come to the city from Bonnettstown, where his family had been farmers for several generations. He met Ellen O'Gorman (also known as Ellie) at a dancing-board in Threecastles at the end of the 1930s.

The O'Gormans were a well-known Kilmoganny family (Ellie's father was the local postman) and she was the eldest in a family of five girls and a boy born to James and his wife Catherine (nee O'Sullivan).

At the time they met, Ellie was working on the domestic staff of a doctor's household in Dublin. It took a little time to sever that connection and she and Daniel were married in 1941,  settling in Kilkenny City, and living at various times in their early years together at Kieran Street, John's Quay, and Assumption Place. They raised three children - Margaret, Michael and Seamus.

Michael Noel Brennan was born on December 17 1943. Known also as Mícheál and Mike, he spent his childhood absorbed in books at the Carnegie Library, playing with his brother and friends in the local ball alley, and exploring nature out on the ancestral Brennan family farm just outside the city.

Tragedy struck in 1959 when his father died at the early age of fifty-four. But education had always been highly valued in the Brennan family and Michael was supported in continuing his secondary education at St. Kieran's College, where he win several distinctions and scholarships.

 

EARLY ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT AND CAREER

His early academic promise was realised when he enrolled at University College Cork, from which he graduated in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and Statistics. He went on to secure a Higher Diploma in Education, also from UCC.

He began his teaching career in Kilkenny in 1966, but in 1968  emigrated to Manchester, where he worked first as a computer programmer but then moved back to education as a lecturer at Salford College of Technology (now the University of Salford) and later as a teacher at the innovative Manchester Free School.

In 1975 he returned to Ireland and took up a teaching position at Our Lady's Bower Secondary School in Athlone. In 1982 he secured a Master of Arts degree in Mathematics from the National University of Ireland at Maynooth (now Maynooth University). 

In 1984 he married Breda Heavey, a native of Athlone, and they went on to have a family of four girls.

The main part of his career was spent in the Department of Computing, Mathematics and Physics at Waterford Institute of Technology, now South-East Technological University, whose staff he joined in 1985 and from which he retired in 2009.

In all of his teaching locations he was also involved in a wide range of social and cultural activities: examples included supporting outreach to the homeless in Manchester; facilitating aid for inhabitants of Pakistan affected by war with India; fighting to preserve the Viking settlement at Woodstown; and promoting the interests of residents in the estate on Waterford's Dunmore Road where he had made his home.

His caring attitude and practical Christianity were also evident throughout his life in his dealings with students and colleagues, who were universally praising of the help and support he gave them; the phrase 'a scholar and a gentleman' was repeatedly used in tributes to him on the internet obituaries website rip.ie  - direct link here  

 

PROFESSIONAL ENGAGEMENT 

In his professional life he was actively involved in the proceedings of the Irish Maths Teachers' Association for many years, acting as a corrector for the finals of the IMTA's 'Team Maths' competitions and often proofreading important policy documents that were being prepared in response to curriculum change.

In 2008 he became involved in a controversy about the high levels of failures in Leaving Certificate Mathematics. Writing in the Irish Examiner, he suggested that recent international studies had shown the dangers of adapting maths education to make it more applicable to real-world situations.

“Perhaps a more applied type of practical maths, which would be somewhere between the standard of the higher and ordinary-level courses, would allow more students to get higher-level grades, as an alternative to widening the current course,” he wrote, in opposition to the Department of Education proposal to develop Project Maths, which involved more practical applications and problem solving elements to increase interest in the subject, particularly at higher level.

“If that’s the way people want to go, with more practical elements, they shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking it’s pure maths,” he continued. “The standard of maths has definitely weakened among students starting college in the past 10 years or more. The remedies are not simple, they are complex, but we have to be careful about tinkering with it and dumbing it down, which is the direction we’re at risk of going in."

 

INSULAR ART

As he approached retirement, he was able to devote more time to his other interests, beginning with the study of the origins and artistry of the Celtic Cross, which he resulted in the publication of An Examination of the Modern Celtic Cross in the Old Kilkenny Review, the Journal of Kilkenny Archaeological Society in 2001. 

He soon expanded his field of study to encompass the entire area of early medieval decoration of manuscripts and artefacts. Between 2004 and 2011, when he was already in his sixties, he undertook a Ph.D on The Structure of Interlace in Insular Art c. A.D. 400-1200 under the supervision of Professor Nancy Edwards of Bangor University in Wales. 

His application of mathematical principles to the understanding of the interlace design process, which involves the the creation of the intricate interwoven patterns, was regarded as an advance of international importance.

He described the attraction of this area of study to a correspondent as follows: 'My interest lies in exploring the possibilities raised by the highly structured nature of early medieval art in both Western Europe and the early Islamic world. 

'Using maths-style reasoning I drew up a set of principles underlying interlace — including animal interlace which, being somewhat complex, had never been analysed. Using these principles I have been able to demonstrate some new aspects to old familiar art objects, including manuscript art.'

As a result of his studies and expertise in the art of Celtic imagery, he became an Honorary Research Associate in the School of History, Philosophy and Social Sciences at Bangor University and a Research Associate with The Irish Art Research Centre (TRIARC) in the Department of Philosophy in Trinity College Dublin. 

 

PUBLICATIONS

Several of Michael's scholarly essays have appeared in compilation volumes and specialist publications in the decade before his death.

In his article Das Buch von Lindisfarne – a Facsimile with a Difference in the review Peritia 26 in 2015 Michael gave an account of the image-processing modifications made during the production in the early 2000s of a high-quality facsimile of the iconic Hiberno-Saxon manuscript. The modifications compromise the facsimile in a small number of places, he suggested, but the implications for the whole enterprise of digitising manuscripts, especially illuminated manuscripts, are significant.

In The Lindisfarne Gospels: the art of symmetry and the symmetry of art, a contribution to the volume The Lindisfarne Gospels: New Perspectives, ed. Richard Gameson (Brill, 2017), Michael submitted that the decorative art of the Lindisfarne Gospels, particularly in respect of its symmetry and asymmetry, offers insights into the intellectual gifts of the artist, and into his understanding of the artistic part of his mission. If the illuminator of a sacred book was thought to be an agent of God, divinely inspired to edify the faithful with celebratory images, gloriously ornamented capitals and reverential portraits, then Eadfrith simultaneously exemplifies and refines this role. His experiments with interlace in particular, may lead modern observers to wonder if his work was not at times as much rationalist as religious, and its author an implicit mathematician.

In 2019 he wrote a chapter with the title Alcuin, Mathematics and the Rational in Insular Iconographies: Essays in Honour of Jane Hawkes, ed. Meg Boulton & Michael D.J. Bintley (Boydell Press) in which he examined the evidence for Alcuin having been the author of the eighth/ninth century 'Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes' as well as his relationship to mathematics, exegetical and other. Alcuin's achievements on a wider front – education, doctrine, monasticism and even politics – are noted.

In his communication to the correspondent already mentione, he expressed his ongoing scholarly intentions in these words: 'I am tentatively working on aspects of early Islamic Art, examining (a) Byzantine influences, particularly in its treatment of interlace and how this deviated from European styles (b) symmetry and asymmetry in the so-called ‘Arabesque’, properly islīmī aṣl, and (c) the role, if any, for the modern concept of ‘complexity’ in the deeply layered stylization of interlace in the presence of islīmī aṣl and calligraphy, and the implication of finding such complexity for the underlying philosophy of the art. 

'I have begun a monograph on the nature and role of interlace in the medieval period, part of which will deal with the role of interlace in Islamic Art.'

 

KILKENNY-RELATED SCHOLARSHIP 

In explaining his approach taken in his An Examination of the Modern Celtic Cross in the  2001 edition of the Old Kilkenny Review Michael wrote: 'This article from 15 years ago, while still valid as an introduction to the topic, serves as a pointer towards the need for a  thorough and far-reaching study of the phenomenon of the 19th/20th -century Celtic revival high cross. A thing of fashion in Irish graveyards for almost a 100 years, it carried layers of meaning and intention in a country struggling with its identity. Its impact was also felt on graveyard sculpture in Scotland, the UK generally, the Americas, Australia and elsewhere.'

In 2022 he gave a lecture in Kilkenny City on the interlacing patterns in the floor decoration of St John's Church.  During his regular attendance at the heritage walks organised by a local group, he often featured as a contributor. A participant in one of these sessions remembered that 'the talk/walk commenced at Kilkenny Castle where Michael cast new light on the scores of time-worn carved faces on the walls and gave a riveting account of how the Moorish staircase was added to the castle, elaborating also on the origin of a classical symmetric entrance.

'From the castle he took us on a most perceptive examination of brickwork in old buildings along the Parade and in St. Kieran’s Street. For other walks he expounded on the ancient face sculptures at St. Francis Abbey and outlined the significance of interlace panels at St. Mary’s Cathedral. He had a special place in his heart, he said, for the “rescued” Madonna of St. Mary’s, so-called because a local woman saved it from a demolition site.'

Sadly his death meant that he would  not have the opportunity to fulfill a prospect he had mentioned - 'looking at the inside of St. John’s this morning I dreamt of doing one last talk on sculpture and the odd bit of brickwork, all in St. John’s Parish' - nor the chance to deliver a formal lecture he was due to give on stone craft in Kilkenny buildings to the Kilkenny Archaeological Society in January 2025

 

DEATH, FUNERAL AND BEREAVED

Michael Noel Brennan died in Waterford University Hospital on 20th November 2024 having lived with blood cancer for several years. His funeral took place with Requiem Mass on November 23rd in St Mary's Church, Ballygunner, Waterford, followed by burial in the adjoining cemetery.

He is survived by his four daughters Kate, Amy, Deirdre and Rachel; their mother Breda; his grandsons Max and Otis; his sister Margaret Sherlock and her family in Co. Louth; his sons-in-law Stephen, Dave, Ger and Luke, and the family of his late brother Seamus, a popular teacher in Kilkenny for many decades, who died in 2023. 

Michael’s daughters reflect his own broad range of interests, as they work across the fields of psychology, public service, education, gender research and the arts. As well as his mentoring of their advancement, his own contribution to the progress of knowledge in his chosen areas is also secure and completes his legacy to Kilkenny and the wider world.