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Irish connection for French presidential
candidate  Growing
up in fashionable Rathgar in the 1970s, Graziella Roche was looked after
by countless au pairs.
Most however were unmemorable, particularly the French.
“Quite honestly, we didn’t like them much,” recalls
Graziella Schuster as she is now called. “They didn’t seem
very interested in us.”
Only one left a lasting impression 18-year-old Ségolène,
the fun, warm-hearted girl who would spend hours playing with Graziella
and her two brothers, chasing butterflies around the garden.
However the next time Graziella set eyes on Ségolène, over
30 years later, her childhood au pair was bidding to become the first
female president of France.
Seeing Ségolène Royal on television evoked a childhood memory
in Graziella.
She first thought it was just coincidence that the Socialist candidate
looked just like the au pair who stayed in the family home in the summer
of 1970. The name Ségolène only added to the coincidence,
she thought.
But imagine her surprise when she realised three weeks later that the
53-year-old Royal was indeed the au pair she remembered so fondly.
Graziella said: “The Ségolène I remember was a very
warm-hearted person, a very kind person, with bags of energy and patience.
Even before I realised that she was our Ségolène, I admired
her greatly.”
The Roche family is not the only Irish link to the would-be French president.
Sheena Beale, a solicitor from Dublin, was in Normandy as an exchange
student in 1969.
Next door to her host family was a girl named Ségolène,
who she became firm friends with. It provides pleasant memories for Ms.
Beale.
She said: “We spent the whole summer together, swimming, playing
tennis, talking about boys. We both wanted to be lawyers. I never imagined
she would go into politics.” |
