Father Brendan Devlin went to the Irish College in Paris in 1963 in the hope of finding a room there. "I was turned away at the door because the College was inhabited by 67 Poles," says Devlin, now a monsignor. "I had to go and live in a garret. It got up my nose so much I made a mental vow to `remedy' the Poles and retrieve part of the mythology of Ireland."
On Wednesday, the Government announced it will finance the £7 million restoration of the 225-year-old building, at a ceremony in the college. The funding represents the culmination of 33 years of effort by Mgr Devlin. The restoration will create a vibrant Irish cultural centre with housing for 50 students in the heart of the French capital - something any European ambassador would envy. "This is the first time Ireland has done anything like this," says Billy Glynn, the retired Ulster Bank executive who is treasurer for the Irish Foundation that runs the College. "It's going to be a showpiece for Ireland."
Yet if the project is to succeed, the Government and the ageing, all-male trustees of the College must define Irish culture. Does it mean offering Irish-language courses in Paris - as college administrator Roisin Dockery, a Maynooth graduate, expects? Or would Irish courses be ludicrous when there is no demand for them, as a Government official suggests? The protagonists of the Irish College saga are involved in a tug-of-war between New Ireland and Old Ireland, where it is the Anglophile, globalised and secularlised Ireland of Temple Bar and the Celtic Tiger versus tradition, Catholicism and the Gaelic League cultural nationalism of Mgr Devlin's generation. And unless someone with immense energy and tact reconciles these competing strands of Irish identity - unless there is the political will and continuing financial commitment to make it a success - the £7 million from the Office of Public Works will be wasted and the restored college will sink back into lethargy and its present role as little more than a glorified bed and breakfast.
On an acre of land behind the Pantheon, the college is the most valuable Irish property abroad, officially valued at £35 million more than a decade ago. It is also a powerful symbol of the 1537-1829 penal laws, when to circumvent the British prohibition on the training of priests a network of 29 Irish Colleges was set up across Europe. Today, only three remain: Louvain, Rome and Paris.
When the Minister of State at the Department of Finance with responsibility for Public Works, Martin Cullen, visited the Irish College last year, he said: "It's worth doing, and it's worth doing right." The OPW hired one of its own former employees, the architect David Slattery, to oversee restoration. Slattery was the first Irish architect to specialise in conservation and is best known for his work on Dublin Castle and the Custom House. His philosophy, he says, is to repair structural damage from insects and damp, but otherwise save it "pretty nearly warts and all". He compares the Irish College to an old book. "You wouldn't look at an 18th-century book and say, `I'll tear a few pages out because they're stained'. You wouldn't say, `the cover is damaged so I'll replace it.' "
The roof of the Irish College will be removed so that half-metre-thick beam-ends damaged by death-watch beetles can be trimmed and "scarfed" into new beam ends. The beetles have been particularly active over the library, where the ceiling is in danger of caving in. "They like the timber to be damp," Slattery explains. "It's just easier to munch. They like to eat at night and it makes a crunching noise."
Saint Patrick's chapel, which underwent extensive restoration in the 1860s, is the other chief focus of Slattery's attention. The Renaissance revival paint-work is flaking and rising damp has split the oak panelling. "Although the chapel is of a later period," he says, "it is of substantial interest in its own right." A lovely 17th-century stone statue of a Virgin and Child stands at the front of the chapel, but the paintings in the nave are of the sentimental, pious 19th-century Saint Sulpice style. "It's a historical document," says Joe McDonald of the Irish Arts Review. "There were churches like this all over Ireland, but most of this stuff vanished after Vatican II - it was considered outdated and in poor taste."
McDonald's research has confirmed that a large painting of the martyrdom of St Edmund which hangs in the college refectory was brought from the English College in 1802 and had hung above the body of James II when he was laid out in state. A rare, 17th-century wrought-iron spiral staircase - part of a townhouse around which the Irish College was built - was used for storage by the Poles, but will receive a prominent place in the new college.
Because the Irish College is the only surviving pre-revolutionary building of the University of Paris, the French also treasure it. It was designed by Francois-Joseph Belanger, one of the leading architects of the 18th century and a court architect for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. After the 1789 revolution, the college became a school for fashionable young men, where Napoleon's younger brother Jerome and stepson Eugene de Beauharnais studied. Its twice weekly balls were attended by the Empress Josephine and Mme Recamier.
So it was not surprising that the French civil servants, who had for decades rubberstamped accounts for the college and three other Paris properties belonging to the Irish Foundation, balked when Mgr Devlin - the head of the French department at Maynooth and then newly-named rector of the college - showed up at one of their annual meetings in 1984. "The French thought we wanted to take it away from them," Mgr Devlin explains. His predecessor as rector, a Vincentian priest, told him: "Don't say anything or do anything because if you cause problems, the French government will confiscate it." The Vincentians were still traumatised by a French attempt to take over the college in 1905, at the time of the Loi Combes on the separation of church and state.
Mgr Devlin had been planning the Irish re-conquest of the college for 21 years by the time he was named rector. The Irish bishops had allowed a large group of Polish priests who escaped death at the Dachau concentration camp to move into the college in 1945.
"They had a long history of dealing with totalitarianism, and it was practically impossible to establish any kind of dialogue with them," Mgr Devlin remembers. With a letter from an Irish bishop, he managed to place his first "mole" inside the college in the late 1960s. He was Padraig O Gormaile, who now heads the French department at University College, Galway, and he reported back to Mgr Devlin on activities within the Polish seminary.