Memories of Ferns evoked in Fouquet's : 27 Nov 2007

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More than 100 people attended writer Colm Tóibín’s annual Ireland Fund of France lecture at the Irish College in Paris.  They were, Tóibín noted gratefully, a particularly attentive, engaged audience!

Tóibín recounted his school days at Ferns College in Co. Wexford, and how it came as a shock to him to learn that the priest who had befriended him and another boy had earlier been disciplined for child abuse.  He described the veil of silence over the scandal, the way all the priests in the college knew but no one said anything.

Tóibín then read a short story from his latest book, Mothers and Sons, about an elderly Irish woman who learns that her son, a priest, is to stand trial for child abuse.

“I was frightened to death when [the director of the Irish College], Sheila [Pratschke] told me [the subject],” Pierre Joannon, the president of The Ireland Fund of France, told Tóibín after the talk.  “But you put it so well, with such delicacy.”

Joannon organized a dinner at Fouquet’s on the Champs-Élysées, James Joyce’s favorite Parisian restaurant, which was attended by ten people, including Ireland’s Ambassador Anne Anderson, and Barry McCrea, a writer-in-residence at the Irish College.  Also present was Maggie Doyle, director of foreign acquisitions at the French publisher Robert Laffont (which will publish Mothers and Sons in French next March).

Tóibín combined the Paris trip with journeys to Majorca and Geneva for a piece he is writing on the Catalan painter Miquel Barceló for an upcoming exhibition at Imma.  IN January, Tóibín will begin a ten-week stay at Stanford University in California, where he will teach a course entitled “Dublin,” to include James Joyce, Seán O’Casey, and Yeats’ Dublin poems.