Niall Lawlor from Tra more, Co Waterford, is enjoying his course at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, better known as "Sciences Po", but he is amused by the French slant on modern history.
"The Cold War lectures are all about whether states, namely the US, should be allowed to treat other states like shit," he says. The destruction of a Greenpeace ship on orders from the French defence minister has been glossed over. "The book just says, `Unfortunately, in 1982 the Rain- bow Warrior sank'," Mr Lawlor laughs.
"It's not so much that the Americans are the villains of the Cold War," Mr Emmet Ryan from Portmarnock, Co Dublin, says, "but that they dominate the world economically and ideologically. Here we are told about the McDonaldisation of society, the fact that American multinationals have outlets all over Europe. The French are much more interested in national honour than the Irish."
Their spoken French falters and they are still mastering the intricacies of French protocol and bureaucracy, but after less than three months in Paris, ten 20-year-old Irish exchange students from Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin have a shrewd understanding of their temporary home.
They find France more politically polarised than Ireland. "Both the left and the right in France dislike America, the left for ideological reasons, the right because of its `cultural imperialism'," Mr William Leahy from Ballsbridge, Dublin, says. He is studying French trade unionism. "Here you've got the CGT [one of the main trade unions] that is very close to the Communist Party. There is nothing like that in Ireland; we are much more centrist, less extreme. It's quite refreshing."
"The division between left and right permeates everything," Mr Manus Bonner from Leopardstown, Co Dublin, says, "even the newspapers. We're told Le Monde is centreleft and the Figaro is rightwing. We're given the Figaro here at Sciences Po. A female French student said to me, `Ugh. It's a right-wing newspaper! Don't take it," and I said: `But it's free!' "
Mr Bonner was also struck by what he sees as ethnocentricity in his economics course. "In Ireland we studied Adam Smith, Keynes. Here we had a whole tutorial on Jean-Baptiste Say, who rated only a paragraph in my textbook at home. There's a big emphasis on Jean-Baptiste Say, just because he's French."
Ms Fiona Kennedy from Galway says the French are more troubled than the Irish about what they see as the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. "Regarding the Muslim world, we're being taught that allegiance to religion challenges allegiance to the state," she explains. "I wouldn't have had any knowledge of Muslim countries in Ireland."
Although the Irish students arrived nearly two months after France's World Cup victory, they found the country still riding the wave of euphoria. "We did an intensive French course at the beginning," Ms Kennedy recalls. "Two to three weeks entirely devoted to football."
With straight-faced sarcasm, Eimear Ni Bheoin from Glasnevin, Dublin, comments: "It was of general interest to all of us."
The joys of student life in Paris are timeless. The young Irish men and women like walking through the city, cinemas, pastry and good, cheap wine. All have visited at least one of the more than 50 Irish pubs in the French capital, and Mr Bonner has introduced his colleagues to Corcoran's at St Michel, where the bartenders give them special rates.
The drawbacks never change either, chief among them French bureaucracy. Mr Lawlor got so entangled in red tape trying to open a bank account that he gave up and lives off his Irish bank card. The queues for residence papers at the Prefecture on the Ile de la Cite are infamous, and obtaining a telephone requires several visits to France Telecom.
Ms Annie O'Carroll and Ms Deirdre Fenton of UCD found changing address, from student housing in what they call the "Harlem-like" immigrant suburb of Sarcelles to a small flat at the Bastille, a daunting administrative challenge.
The Sciences Po programme is demanding, and the students claim they spend an average of four hours a day in the library. Is the library always overheated, smelly and stuffy, as it was in my Paris student days? I ask. They all laugh. "The French don't like windows open at all," Ms O'Carroll says. "They give you a dirty look when you open the window, and they close it on the sly as soon as you're not looking."
This is the first year that Ireland has participated in the international programme at Sciences Po, at the initiative of Ms Chantal Barry, a Dubliner who became a professor at the French university eight years ago. In exchange, 10 French students are spending the year at TCD and UCD. Ms Barry believes these universities are creating the Europeans of tomorrow.
"In their future careers they'll be working with people from all over Europe," she says. "The Irish will know where the French are coming from, and the French will know where the Irish are coming from."
Ms Barry teaches a class on the history of Northern Ireland to French students. "They are very surprised by what they learn," she says. "They either see it as a romantic struggle between good and evil, or a very antiquated religious war. Counteracting these myths is a great challenge." She usually begins by writing the words "Republican" and "Nationalist" on the blackboard. "These words mean completely different things to the French and the Irish," she says.
