Lecturer Marie Louise O'Donnell, who is tipped for a top position in DublinCity University's ambitious new arts centre, was instrumental in encouragingartists to come to DCU. Anne Byrne reports

The sheer grey stone wall of the new arts centre is one of the few architectural curves to grace DCU's crowded campus.

Its presence is almost shocking to the eye among so many squared-off, sharply-cornered red-brick buildings. The curving centre owes its presence in no small part to the energetic Marie-Louise O'Donnell, actor, arts organiser, speech and drama enthusiast and communications lecturer. When it opens next October, she will renounce the latter title to take up an as-yet-untitled position in the new centre.

Marie Louise's presence in DCU, where students predominantly study the sciences, engineering and computing, is almost as startling as the advent of the arts centre. "I come from a background of performance. My mother, Máire Cranny, was a very good director of children's theatre. My father was a marvellous storyteller, a wit, a fiddle player and a great trumpeter."

During her school days as a boarder in Loreto Cavan, she was involved with the school orchestra, musicals, and debates. "The nuns were very forward-looking. I wasn't good at sports. I had no energy when it came to a hockey stick. It bored me. The nuns facilitated me."

From there, she went to the London Guildhall, Nottingham University and NUI Maynooth, gaining qualifications in drama, the arts and education. She was duly appointed to a lectureship in drama in Carysfort teacher-training college.

"I was 27, my students were 18. There wasn't a huge age difference. I developed the Carysfort Dublin City Jazz Speech Choir there. They performed twice on the Late Late as well as BBC and other RTÉ programmes.

"Seamus Heaney was teaching in the college at the time. He was delightful. He has a great belief that poetry is understood through the rhythms of sound, by the ear rather than the eye. He was very encouraging about the choir.

"In Carysfort, we were getting full Irish accents and voices. Rather than de-nature and stylise them, I encouraged them to be articulate and animated." The aural is more important than the visual to Marie Louise and she castigates RTÉ television for putting on presenters with the "most appalling voices, people screaming at the camera, mistaking high-pitched bawling for personality".

Back in Carysfort, she says teaching drama was very important, as the teachers would then take it with them to the children in primary schools around the State.

"I believe that when we do drama with children, we should not dress them up like cats and dogs in simplistic plays, but we should elevate them, stretch them, introduce them to Longfellow's Hiawatha. A high standard, with attention to detail, must be maintained."

Ten years later, in one annus horribilis, Carysford closed (Marie Louise likens it to the sacking of Clonmacnoise); she was pregnant, a single mother, out of a job, and in the middle of moving house.

"I was offered a job in the communications department of NIHE (now DCU) by Farrell Corcoran. I didn't want to take it. He was very encouraging, saying 'we do radio'. I nearly died, moving across to Ballymun, coming to an NIHE, which mostly taught science, electronics, engineering, biology and computing."

Tempted by the thought of radio, a medium in which she had little experience, Marie Louise embarked on a training course with the BBC. "I worked with Libby Purvis on Radio 4. I then went to Breakaway, the radio travel programme - that was a wonderful experience, working with sounds, textures, places, interviews."

In the meantime, DCU had become a university. She returned to the campus to teach communications students, using her BBC training and her arts and drama experience.

"I remember going to Danny O'Hare (then president of DCU) and saying to him that there was no arts on campus. We didn't even have a piano. He asked me what I would like to do and was extremely generous with money at a very tight time.

"I said I was interested in encouraging poets, writers, playwrights on to the campus, to stimulate student and student societies. I brought in actors from the Abbey, which was doing a one-person show, and turned a classroom into a theatre.

"I brought some really brilliant people to the campus. We would shut down the sports centre for two or three days and have Macnas perform. Opera Pimlico did the first open-air opera on the north side of the city, in a large tent. We had two performances, one for the children of Ballymun, the other in the evening." The annual arts week, started by Marie Louise, has become a fixture at DCU.

Artists and writers in residence at the college have included Marina Carr, Ferdia MacAnna and Pat Boran.

"I was given an old dirty lecture hall. We took the tiered desks out, carpeted the tier, painted the walls black and called it the Wild Space. We brought in plays like Catalpa, the Army Number One Band, live nude paining and street theatre.

"We had arts breakfasts. I remember Fintan O'Toole singing and Gerry Stembridge pretending to be Brendan Comiskey. People came in and talked about their experiences." The Larkin musical series started in a "big old chemistry building. We hired the piano and the flowers and people like John O'Connor and Hugh Tinney played. We had performers from Russia and Romania." All of the artistic endeavours were set in a campus that was growing at an extraordinary pace but still had no dedicated arts space. "I asked Danny O'Hare 'don't we need the arts?' He set things in motion for the new centre, which is largely funded from private sources." The college's new president has been equally helpful, she hastens to add.

The arts centre will have a concert hall, a theatre and an experimental theatre. "I'm not going there as the director. I didn't want to be the director. I didn't apply. We have a wonderful new director from England, Nick Reed. My job is untitled yet but it will be great. I want to be involved in artistic programming rather than administration. I'll be very involved in the experimental theatre, which we are calling the Wild Space.

"It will be a platform for sound, for great voices, interesting voices, extraordinary voices.

"I began listening as a child to the farmers' babble on fair day, their coughing, spluttering, arguing and dealing. I listened to the rituals of the church, the Corpus Christi procession, the muttering. I'm back at it."