Two early experiences were to prove seminal for Eoghan MacDonagh in underpinning his ambition to live and work in Paris. The first was a language exchange, the second an Erasmus year at the Paris II Panthéon Assas university while he was studying law at Trinity College Dublin.
“On a language exchange, I remember being fairly lonely in a very rigid French boarding school,” he says. “However, on one of those long French May bank holidays, I went to stay with another teenager and his mother on a houseboat in the centre of Paris. They lived quite a liberal existence and showed me the best of Paris for a few days. A small but formative moment. My motivation to learn French quickly changed and that probably set me on a path.”
A few years later on the Erasmus programme, MacDonagh remembers feeling somewhat overwhelmed that half his law degree would be examined in French. “I nearly decided to come home but, after some well-timed pep talks from family and other students, I stayed,” he says.
He joined the university’s rugby team and, as the only foreigner, quickly became proficient in French. “That year made settling into working life in Paris a lot easier when the time came,” says MacDonagh, who went to school at Gonzaga College.
When he moved to Paris full-time a few years later, integration was also eased by the fact that he had both French and non-French friends from different backgrounds.
“We had little in common in terms of careers, which I think made our friendships all the more refreshing and enriching,” he says. “We may have known a lot about each other’s music tastes and different cultural traits, but would be at a loss as to what everyone did on a Monday morning.”
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MacDonagh is a senior associate with the law firm Clifford Chance, which has its headquarters in London and is one of the big names in international law and part of the so-called “magic circle” – the top five London-based law firms.
He was one of 50 young graduates taken on when he joined the firm as a trainee in London in 2014.
“Arriving in London, it felt like a lot was happening all at once: huge city, incredibly impressive peers, international housemates,” he says. “By chance, there were nine Irish graduates who joined Clifford Chance at the same time. We all instantly hit it off and they really helped me settle in.”
Ten years on and MacDonagh has spent roughly half his time in the London office and half in the firm’s Paris office, where he is currently based. Most of his work is focused on international arbitration and issues related to sustainability and climate change.
He was drawn to international arbitration as it often raises novel issues in law and what he describes as “really tense, exciting moments during the course of oral advocacy. There is also the chance to get deep into how an industry or sector works, often through dealing with and cross-examining experts in their fields”.
This interest, coupled with broader interests in politics and current affairs, drew him towards specialising in issues related to energy transition, he says. “Energy transition and climate change mitigation transcend borders,” he says. “This means that when legal issues arise, policymakers and courts in one jurisdiction often take inspiration from another.”
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For MacDonagh, this means keeping on top of EU and UK climate policy and wider issues related to the energy transition.
“The 2015 Paris agreement set the common goal across states for climate change mitigation, adaptation and finance,” he says. “But actual implementation requires much more detailed work through incentives and regulation. That raises really interesting questions as to what responsibilities states and businesses have in society, and what roles the legislature and the judiciary have.”
Earlier this year MacDonagh had the opportunity to go on a three-month secondment to his firm’s Amsterdam office. “It was a wonderful insight into how another city and a different office culture works,” he says. “The Dutch have a reputation for being direct and that’s true, as they would readily admit, but I found my colleagues there to be exceptionally welcoming.”
MacDonagh misses Dublin but says it never feels too far away, as he and his wife, Katherine, go home often and share many of the same Irish friends.
“Both our parents love all things French, which helps, and living in Paris in recent years has also meant lots of Irish visitors for sporting events. The French have a strong affinity for the Irish and I think we’ve always done ourselves very proud here.
“Recent times in France have seen much political upheaval but we saw first-hand what the Olympics meant in terms of bringing people together,” he says. “There was a lot of resistance to the Olympics in the lead-up, but a real sense of pride came over the city as it unfolded.”
MacDonagh relaxes by running, cycling, listening to podcasts and reading.
“I’m currently reading Impossible City by Simon Kuper [a Financial Times journalist who moved to Paris in the early 2000s]. It’s a memoir but also an attempt to get under the many layers of Parisian culture which, to be honest, is a fascinating but never-ending endeavour,” says MacDonagh, who recently become a first-time father after the birth of their daughter and is looking at a move back to the firm’s London office towards the end of the year when his secondment in Paris ends,
