From ceili band to following in the footsteps of Beckett

When Siofra Pierse arrived in Paris to take up her position as a lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure, her fellow professors were ecstatic.

"You're the first Irish person we've had since Beckett!" one exclaimed. The Nobel Prize-winning writer taught at "Normale Sup" from 1928 until 1930, overlapping for one year with the poet Thomas McGreevy.

But TCD's link with one of France's most prestigious grandes ecoles was lost decades ago, and the post of lecturer in Anglo-Irish literature now goes to a French-speaking doctoral student from Oxford or Cambridge.

After studying French and Italian at UCC, Ms Pierse won a Rhodes scholarship - one of only eight in Europe - to Oxford in 1994 and moved on to "Normale Sup" in 1997. She would like to see other Irish students in Oxbridge colleges follow her example, so that Ireland might stake an informal claim to Beckett's old job.

There is no straighter path to the heart of the French intellectual establishment than "Normale Sup". "It's like Oxford and Cambridge condensed," Ms Pierse explains. "Instead of 40 colleges there is just one."

The college was founded by revolutionaries in 1794 to train teachers. Like all of the French grandes ecoles, admission is based on an exam failed by thousands.

"I've met people who never got over not getting in," Ms Pierse says. "For the rest of their lives they see themselves as sub-brilliant. The corollary is that those who get in are forever brilliant. They are the elite."

For their four years of study, normaliens are considered civil servants and receive a stipend of about £1,000 a month.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir met at "Normale Sup". Other famous normaliens include the late President Georges Pompidou, the former prime minister, Mr Laurent Fabius, and Francois Mitterrand's daughter, Ms Mazarine Pingeot. The scientific branch of "Normale Sup" may generate more Nobel Prize-winners, but the school's philosophers and writers are better known: Raymond Aron, Michel Foucault, Bernard HenriLevy, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Jean d'Ormesson . . . "They need someone who's not going to be shy," Ms Pierse says of her own appointment. "Because the normaliens are terrifying." On her first day at work a student told her snottily: "Madame, vous avez mal compris le Francais".

"It was their only weapon, and my gosh they fired it!" Ms Pierse recalls.

But her age - at 26 she is scarcely older than her students - and her Irishness helped. She taught most of her classes in the Salle Samuel Beckett and became familiar with the folklore that has grown up around his stay there 70 years ago. "People say he didn't particularly like his students, that he wasn't terribly sociable," she explains. "He would have taught the same classes I did, translation and Anglo-Irish literature. The Ecole Normale doesn't change much."

So will there be a "Salle Siofra Pierse" at "Normale Sup" in 70 years' time? The young Irishwoman laughs. "Beckett was a great writer and thinker," she says. "I'm just an ordinary Irish person who's been very lucky . . . If I were to write, it would be later on. I'm aware that I'm young."

If anything distinguishes her French students from friends at UCC and Oxford, Ms Pierse says, it is their seriousness. French normaliens found Waiting for Godot "black and catastrophic", she says. "They didn't want to do it again. A professor in the French department told me, `There are going to be suicides'. I explained that at home there is a human, comical side to Godot."

Too much work and competition may account for the gloominess. "They start at eight in the morning and work until night," Ms Pierse says. "Unfortunately, the mentality of having to put in the hours doesn't leave them."

She tends to share the outlook of her hero and the subject of her doctoral thesis, Voltaire. "When you're young, you must love like crazy; when you are old, work like the devil," the 18th-century philosophe wrote. At Oxford Ms Pierse joined a ceili band called The Floozies. "I did the calling. I was the voice and I taught them to dance. We did all the balls and a lot of weddings."

The French are particularly protective about their university posts, Ms Pierse says, and lectureships for foreigners at "Normale Sup" last for only two years. She will move to Dublin in September, to teach French literature at UCD, returning eventually to her research on Voltaire.

It was Voltaire's sense of irony that drew her to him. "He looks at everything in the world and says, `It's not what it seems'. There's a constant questioning, a constant goading of other people to challenge the status quo . . . Voltaire said only 5 per cent of the population think, and he said he was being generous."