J'ADORE l'Irlande. "I don't know how many times I've heard that," said Doirennn Ni Bhriain. Why do the French love Ireland? "For the literature, the landscape and for political reasons," explained Michel Ricard, the French commissioner with L'Imaginaire. "Some of them marched in the 1970s for Bernadette Devlin."
Easy interpretations of Irish nationalism had just taken a public beating when the Abbey's production of Frank McGuinness's Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme opened at the Theatre de l'Odeon. Yes, L'Imaginaire was displaying, in Ricard's words, "a more complex Ireland".
The warm reception for McGuinness's powerful work was certainly overwhelming. While Mrs Robinson looked on from the gilt-edged dress circle of this elegant, 18th-century theatre, director Patrick Mason took his place on the stage with the men of Ulster. Then McGuinness was wormed out of his seat by the applauding audience, and he climbed onto the stage.
Fabulously fussy French cakes and oh, champagne again, were served under the vast domed ceiling of the reception room. It was a moment of intense pride, and as we wandered out among the huge, soft-yellow buildings of the Paris night. "J'adore l'Irlande" seemed the only intelligent thing to say.