MAGAN'S WORLD:
MANCHÁN MAGAN'stales of a travel addict
IT IS reassuring to think that an idealised Ireland exists in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, just up from the Seine, amidst glorious examples of Louis XIV and Napolean III elegance and extravagance. It’s called Centre Culturel Irlandais, and while part of the pleasure of any trip to Paris is staying in a Parisian hotel, for a longer sojourn it’s worth considering the affordability, centrality and sense of community of this former ecclesiastical college (Collège des Irlandais).
The bedrooms are rented out mostly to Irish students on their Erasmus year; but also to a handful of poets, composers and artists seeking inspiration from the neoclassical splendour of the Pantheon and the venerable halls of the Sorbonne. In fact, anyone can stay, and for €920 (€30 a night) I passed a memorable month there last autumn, in a spacious double room, with full use of a catering kitchen and free access to the library and the regular cultural events that showcase the best of Irish art, music, film and small-scale theatre. For shorter stays accommodation starts at €80 per room, but quickly drops for longer stays.
At the core of Centre Culturel Irlandais is something akin to a sanctuary lamp that animates everything inside, from the poets tapping away at their laptops, to the students knocking back vodka and Carrefour lemonade before heading out clubbing.
There is a profoundly beautiful and rare collection of 15th-18th Century theological and historical books housed in a high-vaulted 18th century library, right above the delicately painted Irish chapel. These relics of our culture were almost wiped out during our darkest days and now form one of the finest collections of English-language medieval literature in mainland Europe.
It is their presence that gives the centre a sense of being a tabernacle of our essential selves: a storehouse in Quartier Latin, lest we ever forget who we are. This was the reason the Irish College was built after all, as a bastion of our beliefs – a place to keep our education and faith alive during the darkest penal days.
I like to imagine both Irelands existing simultaneously: big mother Ireland busy with her usual kerfuffle of secretaries ordering printer cartridges, Dublin Bike operators pumping tyres and Waterways Ireland workers clearing knotweed from canal locks; while over on Paris's Left Bank her tiny daughter follows her own slower, more attenuated path, with researchers beetling away on some obscure aspect of Synge's exile fantasies, Trinity students grappling with the vagaries of European property law, harpists tuning their instruments and French hibernophiles learning the aimsir láithreach of tá.
During the Cold War we loaned the building to Polish clerics seeking refuge from communism. It is for this reason that, still today, the odd gaunt Pole will turn up to see the room in which Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, stayed while studying. It’s always a bit of a shock for them after climbing the simple, elegant 17th century staircase to find that, while the proportions of his room are still somewhat seminarian, it now has a power shower, posters on the wall and the scattered bras and hot-pants of whatever young law student is occupying it. When the pilgrims knock on her door, invariably early on a Sunday morning, she’ll likely still be in her pyjamas. Depending on how the night before went, she may consent to allow them in, to creep devotedly across the room and look plaintively out the window through which the future pope once gazed.
Their eagerness to capture even such a tenuous remnant of their fragile past makes me think of how fortunate we are to still have possession of our own sacred relics – timeless manifestations of our culture captured on parchment, bound in leather and stored in climate-controlled cases in our own little piece of Paris.
* centreculturelirlandais.com