'One word I love here in France is solidarité. We lack solidarity'

CRUSADER:Sheila Pratschke has been director of the Irish Film Centre, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig and, for the past four years, the Centre Cultural Irlandais in Paris. Her fascinating career trajectory has given her a unique perspective on Irish culture, writes RUADHAN Mac CORMAIC

IF ONLY ALL MOMENTS of madness led here. Sitting by her window overlooking rue des Irlandais on a midweek afternoon, that’s how Sheila Pratschke jokingly recalls her impulsive decision to take the director’s chair at the Centre Cultural Irlandais in Paris four years ago. At the time, she was happily ensconced at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan, an artists’ retreat where there was no public to please and where the rural solitude gave her the chance, over a six-year stint as director, to try some of those things she’d always promised herself she would: learning about the stars, picking up the names of flowers, honing her bird-watcher’s eye.

“I was very, very happy,” Pratschke recalls. “I really wasn’t thinking about moving. I thought I would stay there until I retired, but the opportunity came up . . . and I think I did it kind of light-heartedly. It was a decision I took because I was 60, and I thought, it’s now or never. Here is one last, wonderful chance being offered to me.”

The cultural centre offers its own sort of peace. A perpetual calm hangs over the magnificent courtyard, and along with the chapel and the restored old library, it’s an oasis from the din of the Latin Quarter’s busier thoroughfares down the hill. But it’s a deceptive calm. The centre is primarily a cultural venue, with a busy schedule of exhibitions, films, plays, readings, concerts and debates aimed at showcasing Ireland to a French audience. But, to all intents and purposes, Pratschke also runs a hotel, a university residence, a library, an educational institution and an adjunct to the Irish embassy. When I visit, preparations are underway for an upcoming visit by the Irish Chamber Choir of Paris to Dublin and Galway – the first time the cultural centre has brought something “home” – and next month’s literary festival has a top-shelf line-up that includes Seamus Heaney.

To get a sense of the privileged perch Ireland occupies on the Parisian cultural scene, pay a visit to the cultural centre for a midweek evening event. In a city where more than 40 countries have similar institutions (even if “some of them are just a man with a phone”, Pratschke laughs), where cultural spaces are as common as cafés and where the city authorities run dozens of free events every week, the French curiosity about Ireland means that she can screen Man of Aran on a wet Tuesday in February knowing she’ll have to turn people away.

“It’s a bit exceptional, isn’t it?” Pratschke says of Ireland’s cachet in the city. “I don’t quite understand it, but I’m glad of it. French people like Ireland. They like the idea of it, even if they’ve never been there.” The interest extends far beyond Francophiles such as Joyce and Beckett and is rooted in a perception that Ireland creates artists “with serious talent and intent”.

“France respects that – there’s the respect for the intellectual here,” she says. “There is a great response to the idea that somebody is tackling things seriously. And I think Irish artists do – they don’t announce themselves as intellectuals the way people do here, but their approach is quite thoughtful as well as instinctive.

For Pratschke, the Paris posting is the culmination of a second career that began in the early 1990s. After a degree in Irish and French, she taught and spent some time giving return-to-work training to women who had been out of the workforce. Having always had an interest in the arts, she then decided to change course, going “back to school” to study fine art, becoming one of the first cohorts of arts administration graduates at UCD.

Their emergence coincided with a blossoming in the Irish arts scene, where a surge in activity and improved funding created a new demand for managers with financial nous. After stints at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, Pratschke took the job of director at the Irish Film Centre (now the Irish Film Institute) in 1994. She remembers it as a thrilling time: the centre was just two years old, Temple Bar was in the throes of major regeneration, new young film-makers were coming to the fore and film studies was booming. “It was amazing. I felt very lost when I started. I really didn’t think I knew what I was doing, but it was a terrific time. Temple Bar was full of hope and possibility, and it seemed a great place to be in 1994.”

If Pratschke had gone looking for a change of scenery after seven years at the helm at Eustace Street, she could scarcely have found a more bracing contrast than Newbliss, Co Monaghan. At the Victorian lakeside house at Annaghmakerrig, she fell for the solitude and the surroundings and “almost all the time, I liked the artists who came to stay”, she adds with a grin.

Generous and self-deprecating in conversation, Pratschke sums up the cultural centre’s role quite simply – “to raise the profile, to make a bit of noise and say, ‘here we are, some of what we do is great’ ”. She laughs at her own words, but then sometimes a programme’s most memorable moments really are the simplest. She recalls the evening, in early autumn last year, when they invited students from the local art college’s brass band to play in the courtyard. “It was kind of magical – it worked and it just created a great feeling. It was a lovely sunny evening, and I knew, it was mid-September, ‘yeah, the whole year is going to be good’. It gave me that feeling that the vibe was right.”

From her vantage point in Paris, at once detached and immersed in Ireland’s cultural life, Pratschke has had a good view of how recent funding cuts have affected the arts at home. For someone who admits she has “always believed in throwing money at a problem”, she has no time for the line that artists are somehow better off broke. “It is worrying,” she says, animated by the topic. “It’s very hard for people to survive if funding dries up. Like everybody else, people who work in the arts have mortgages, have families and have commitments, and it’s becoming difficult for them to plan any of that, to stay with it.”

She sees theatre companies that have developed slowly over the years falling “back to square one” and laments how Ireland would lose something “incredibly valuable” if it were to turn off the tap that allows its artists to flourish.

“It feels like the worst [it has been]. In fact, I think there was probably much less money around in the 1970s and 1980s, but this feels less optimistic. It’s like the optimism is being hammered out of us. There’s a lot to lose, and it was a long, hard fight to get proper funding and to get proper acknowledgement for the importance of an arts council, for instance, and a film board and all those kinds of things. It just feels like a tragedy to see them under threat.”

I can hear the ghost of an Irish minister at our shoulder, talking about painful choices, about health, education and social welfare. “That’s the awful truth, but I’ve been a lifelong socialist and I think there are other solutions, honestly,” she replies. “We can look after all of that better than we are doing if we change our priorities and think about ourselves as a community. One word I love here in France is solidarité.” She repeats it slowly. “Solidarity. I think we lack solidarity.”

Whereas Ireland tends to separate culture and the arts “as if they were a strand that’s not necessarily part of everybody”, France embraces a wider, more universal conception. “I think the arts should be seen as an essential and integrated part of everybody’s life – just the same as a good health service, decent schools. None of those things are surplus to requirements.”

Four years after arriving in Paris, Pratschke feels she underestimated how big a change the move would involve and admits she hadn’t fully thought through what it would be like to come here alone. There have been second thoughts from time to time, but now she is delighted she went with that moment of madness. These days, Pratschke finds herself feeling pride in France, or cheering on its teams. She recently bought a house in the south. Perhaps she’ll move there when she retires.

“I’ve always had the idea that I’d like to have, even in a very miniature way, a place that would be informed by the same ethos as Annaghmakerrig, so that I’d be able to have a few writers and artists from time to time and share my space in that way. That would be a long-term dream.”

The Irish Chamber Choir of Paris will perform at the Dublin Unitarian Church on Thursday, October 28th and, with Cois Cladaigh Chamber Choir, at St Nicholas Church in Galway on Saturday, October 30th. The literary festival Poésie et Prose takes places at the Centre Culturel Irlandais from November 18th-20th. www.centreculturelirlandais.com