By the mid-1970s, the principle of entry with an Irish bishop's letter was well-established and Mgr Devlin spent a sabbatical year in the college. He was already in touch with another Irish priest, Father Liam Swords, who had read Mgr Devlin's articles about the college in the ecclesiastical press. "We plotted mournfully for a year," Mgr Devlin recalls, "walking up and down the rue Soufflot and wondering whether our country would ever regain its stake in the Irish College."
Like cuckoo laying eggs in others' nests, the Polish priests held on to the Irish College as their Paris seminary for 52 years. Patrick O'Connor, Ireland's Ambassador to Paris, remembers his first visits to the college as a junior diplomat in the early 1970s. "I went to St Patrick's Day Mass in the chapel, and they sang Hail Glorious Saint Patrick in Polish. Apart from that, one did not go near the Irish College."
"We had all sorts of battles to fight," Mgr Devlin recalls. "The Poles were refugees from communism and they were extremely right-wing. At first they wouldn't let lay students in. Then they wouldn't let women in." When the Poles finally left three years ago, the Irish found bugging devices in the walls, placed there by Polish government agents during the Cold War. Mgr Devlin's campaign to get the Poles out was risky - a Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla had lived in the Irish College several times before he became Pope John Paul II in 1978. And Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, who also had a say in the matter, is the converted son of Polish Jews.
In the 1980s, the Irish managed to reserve one corridor of the college for their own use. Some £750,000 was raised to refurbish 20 rooms, with Pernod-Ricard the largest contributor. The 1989 renovation has been criticised - features include cottage cheese-like pre-fab ceilings, indoor-outdoor carpet and a sewage pipe running across the ceiling of the chaplain's quarters. Now the water-stained roster of donors and the Wicklow granite "Haughey boulder" commemorating the former Taoiseach's inauguration of the 1989 renovation are to be moved from the entry to a more discreet location.
In addition to extricating the college from the Poles' grasp, the Irish had to amend the 1805 Napoleonic decree that gave France the dominant role in the Irish Foundation. In 1991, new statutes, based on the work of Mgr Devlin and the late Ambassador Tadhg O'Sullivan, were approved by the French Conseil d'Etat. Instead of six Frenchmen and one Irishman, the foundation now consists of seven representatives from each country. Although theoretically chosen by the Irish Ambassador to Paris, the seven Irishmen have in fact been chosen by the Committee of Friends of the Irish College, who one source describes as "well-meaning". The Friends deserve credit for caring about the college before the Government did, and volunteering their own time and money.
Mgr Devlin bridles at the oft-heard suggestion that the college - which was, after all, a seminary until the second World War - is dominated by the Catholic Hierarchy.
"There is a canard that this is some kind of ecclesiastical plot," he says angrily. "In Irish tradition, the perception is that I'm a little priest and that the hand of Rome is behind me. The Hierarchy can't run Maynooth, let alone here. The Irish Church is in a state of collapse and no one seems to have noticed."
Yet two of the seven Irish seats on the board are reserved for Maynooth appointees, and the two key Irish positions on the core Franco-Irish committee are held by the same Maynooth men. Most of the half-dozen annual scholarships for Irish students living in the college while studying in Paris have been given to Maynooth students. And when a seat on the board became vacant two years ago, Mgr Devlin chose one of his former students and the vice president of Maynooth, Father Hugh Connolly, to fill the slot, bringing the Maynooth contingent on the board to three out of seven. Dockery, the college administrator, is also a former student of Mgr Devlin. Nor do the architects' plans for the refurbished college show a diminished Church presence. Until now, only the chaplain had rooms in college. As rector, Mgr Devlin will also have an apartment in the new college.
In the mid-1990s, a committee presided over by Mgr Devlin was established to organise more lectures, concerts and exhibitions in the college, despite the Poles' continuing occupation. Prof Paul Brennan, who teaches Irish studies at the Sorbonne, was one of several experts invited to join. He particularly liked the idea of making the college multi-confessional, for Northern as well as Southern Ireland. The committee dissolved itself after three years, apparently because its members could not agree on what constituted Irish culture. "A sort of high-culture versus low-culture phenomenon set in," Prof Brennan says regretfully. Invariably, the response of foundation members when asked what sort of culture the college will promote is that "it will not be elitist".
Prof Brennan believes the college has missed tremendous opportunities to foster Irish culture. It was barely involved in the 1996 Imaginaire Irlandais festival, and did not mark the Paris opening of Michael Collins or Angela's Ashes. No one has invited his French doctoral students to lecture in the college about their research on the secularisation of Ireland, how Irish history is manipulated and rewritten, or the convergence between US, British and Irish culture.
Glynn, the foundation treasurer, is aware of the need to revive the new college. "The board has an age and a gender imbalance," he admits. "We need to bring younger people and women into the Friends of the Irish College and the board." He is counting on the still unchosen cultural executive to transform the college. But there is a danger the executive will be hamstrung by the need for board approval. "My inclination is if you get the right person, you should give them a lot of power, let them get on with it," Ambassador O'Connor says. "We all have this idea that re-launching the Irish College is great. But there is no blueprint."