Museum Ireland, Vol. 22. Monaghan, N. & O'Neill, R. (Eds). Irish Museums Association, Dublin (2012)

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museum ireland 2012 volume 22

IRISH MUSEUMS ASSOCIATION

CUMANN MHÚSAEIM NA HÉIREANN

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IRISH MUSEUMS ASSOCIATION

CUMANN MHÚSAEIM NA HÉIREANN

Museum Ireland, Volume 22 Published by the Irish Museums Association Ltd, 2011 Editors Nigel Monaghan and Rebecca O’Neill Designed by Bill Bolger Printed by Nicholson and Bass, Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim

The IMA welcomes contributions to this critical review. Instructions to authors are available on our website. Please contact us in the first instance outlining your proposed article or review.

Views expressed are those of individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of the editors or the Irish Museums Association Ltd. Members of the IMA receive Museum Ireland as a subscription benefit.

Non-members wishing to subscribe should contact the Administrator.

Potential advertisers should contact the Administrator.

Irish Museums Association, 3rd Floor St Stephen’s Green House, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2 www.irishmuseums.org Telephone: +353-1-4120939 e-mail: office@irishmuseums.org

ISSN 0961-9690

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Contents

Arteffact – Culture for better mental health 94 Morrigan Mason What 99 happens next is a secret Marguerite O’Molloy Seminars on the street: Dublin’s history tours 101 John Gibney

ARTICLES 5

The Decorative Arts – Why the V&A collections are relevant in the 21st Century Sir Mark Jones

Carlow Trails of the Saints Dermot Mulligan

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A Time of Change: Rising to what challenges?

Peadar Kirby

Young Curators Programme; engaging young diverse audiences with museums 104 through innovative technology Jenny Siung

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Staying relevant in spite of it all Michael Starrett

107 Museums and Exhibitions

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Challenging museums and challenging purposes Elizabeth Crooke

Carlow County Museum 108 Crowley Brian

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Ireland’s Heritage and Culture: A Principal Driver of Tourism Growth?

Aidan Pender

Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre Sarah 110 Shiel

Publications and Conferences

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Public spaces for equality and diversity Niall Crowley

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Youth Arts in Museums and ‘Da Horse Outside’ Dominique Bouchard and Jenny Anghelikie Papassotiriou Out in the Open Ciara Canning

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The Irish Community Archive Network – sharing our local history online Lorna Elms The Haunted Hunt: creative inspiration and engagement centred on a diverse museum collection Cara-Jan O’Callaghan

88 Care and access to the Marron Collection Theresa Loftus

112 Castletown decorative arts.

Anne Hodge 113 The special collections handbook Berrnard Meehan 115 Transforming Museums in the Twenty-first Century Rebecca O’Neill Ireland on Show Art, Union, and Nationhood Rebecca O’Neill Cultures of Curating: Curatorial Practices and the Production of Meaning Pippa Little Board of Directors, Irish Museums Association Ltd, 2012

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The Decorative Arts – Why the V&A collections are relevant in the 21st Century

(1812-1852) put it the institution ‘is misnamed a School of Design; it is a mere drawing school’ – rather missing the point that the activity of drawing trains the eye to see and the mind to consider what it is seeing in a way that no other activity can.

Sir Mark Jones

When it was founded in 1837 the V&A was a new kind of museum, created not to house a collection but to achieve a purpose: the improvement of design. The British Museum came into being to house Sir Hans Sloane’s collections; the Louvre to make available to all what had been the royal collection in what had been a royal palace. The V&A began not with a collection, nor with a building, but as a practical action to relieve an anxiety: anxiety that Britain, though pre-eminent in manufacturing was losing ground to competitors in design. A select committee of the House of Commons, set up in 1836, heard evidence of the inadequacy of art education in England, and of the superiority of design elsewhere, particularly in France and Germany. As it neared the production of a report the government decided, for the first time, to take an educational initiative: they would found a government school of design.

Set up in what had been the fine rooms occupied by the Royal Academy of Arts in William Chambers’ magnificent Somerset House, the new school faced an obvious problem. How was design to be taught? The solution lay, from the beginning, in the creation of a teaching collection designated a museum. This contained plaster casts of ancient sculpture, copies of Raphael’s decoration of the Vatican Loggie (by Richard Evans), and a wide range of contemporary decorative art acquired in Paris by the head of the school, the painter William Dyce who came to it from the School of the Board of Manufactures in Edinburgh. By 1844 there were casts of ‘Moresque ornaments from the Alhambra’ and architectural fragments from buildings in England and the Continent, while £1,400 (a greater sum in real terms than the V&A’s current acquisition fund) was spent that year on acquisitions from the Triennial Exposition in Paris. The School and Museum were open to the public, but lack of space and interpretation made visiting the museum a confusing and unsatisfactory experience. And the teaching methods of the school, which consisted largely in drawing approved examples of current and historic art and design, were widely criticised. A cartoon published in Punch in 1845 shows a student solemnly recording a broken Chinese willow pattern salver and reflects current criticism that ‘the system pursued is not equal to the wants of the pupils; it is copy, copy, copy and nothing more’ or as A.W.N. Pugin

In January 1852 Henry Cole was appointed to run the School as joint secretary, with Richard Redgrave of a new ‘Department of Practical Art’ soon to become the Department of Science and Art under the Board of Trade and already responsible for a network of 18 Schools of Art and Design (by 1864 there were 90) across the country. But Cole could see that the educational mission of the School of Design and its museum was not yet accomplished. He understood that there was no point in training excellent designers, and some of the School’s early pupils like Christopher Dresser had proved to be designers of outstanding ability, if there was no market for their designs. As one of the organisers of the Great Exhibition he knew very well that a large public could be interested in the latest goods from around the world – more than six million people had visited the exhibition in six months. So Henry Cole, youthful companion of John Stuart Mill and a Utilitarian through and through, conceived of a triply useful institution that would at once educate designers, inspire manufacturers and reform the taste of the public at large or as he put it ‘elevate the Art-Education of the whole people, and not merely … teach the artisans, who are the servants of the manufacturers’.

Prince Albert agreed that, if Cole would make the School and its Museum part of his scheme to perpetuate the benefits of the Great Exhibition, he could move both to Marlborough House, a royal residence near Buckingham Palace.

‘General principles of decorative art’ were drawn up, beginning ‘the true office of Ornament is the decoration of Utility. Ornament, therefore, ought always to be secondary to Utility’. The new displays opened in May 1852, showing why some designs were good, and others, in a ‘chamber of horrors’ were not.

The new ‘Museum of Ornamental Art’, was successful, attracting more than 125,000 visits in 1853 but Prince Albert had bigger ideas. He wanted an area, south of the park in which the Great Exhibition had been held, to become home to a great network of institutions devoted to the application of art and science to the improvement of industry and so of human life in general. In 1857 a temporary, pre-fabricated iron structure was completed on the new site in Brompton, renamed South Kensington to claim proximity to Kensington Palace by the PR conscious Cole. This utilitarian structure, nicknamed the ‘Brompton Boilers’ and later re-erected behind a new façade in the East End of London (now the

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Museum of Childhood) contained not only the collections of art and design from Marlborough House but also museums of architecture, building materials and construction, sculpture, domestic economy, education, animal products and machines. The result was, unsurprisingly, incoherent. Prosper Merimée called it an ‘immense bazaar’ and even Cole referred to it as a ‘refuge for destitute collections’, but he was determined that it would make an impact.

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‘If ever there was a people’s palace, it is here’ wrote George Wallis, Keeper of the Art Collections, in 1869 ‘a Palace of Art, devoted to the free culture of the million’.

Public museums in the mid-nineteenth century were intended to extend to the lower middle and respectable working classes a sense that great national treasures and the grand public buildings which housed them were the common property of all; so inoculating them against the revolutionary virus that periodically swept continental Europe. In Cole’s mind visits to the museum would have an additional benefit: it would educate visitors as consumers or as he put it ‘…make them hunger after the objects; …so that when they go to the … shops and they will say, ‘we do not like this or that; we have seen something prettier at the museum’. The V&A was then, in its mid-nineteenth century incarnation, a museum devoted to access and education.

In a sideswipe at existing museums Henry Cole declared that far from being a ‘sleepy and useless’ repository the new museum was ‘intended to be used and to the utmost extent consistent with the preservation of the articles; and not only to be used physically, but to be talked about and lectured upon’. A lecture theatre was placed symbolically at the heart of the museum in the centre of the building above the main entrance. Beneath it, immediately on entering the visitor found three splendid refreshment rooms serving food and drink at prices intended to appeal to all income levels. The museum was open three evenings a week so that working people were able to enjoy and learn from it and a great collection of plaster casts of sculpture and plaster casts was formed. Magnificent galleries were created, demonstrating the innovative use of cast iron and elaborately decorated with reminders of every aspect of the arts. J.C. Robinson, the museum’s first professional curator wrote in 1858 ‘practical utility in an educational point of view is [the museum’s] most important function’. And in a lecture intended to answer the questions ‘of what actual use is this museum viewed as part of the direct instructional system of the Department?’ and ‘What is its scope and province in the work of elevating the standard of taste and knowledge of ornamental Art in the country generally?’ he argued that ‘…a museum of specimens is as necessary a complement to the studies of the industrial artist, as the laboratory to the chemist, the observatory to the astronomer, or the dissecting-room to the medical student’. Knowledge gained from museums would not inhibit, but inspire, invention for ‘…he who knows the most will be the most original’.

Popular temporary exhibitions were organised to draw in the general public.

From 1855 the Department of Science and Art circulated exhibitions. The first was seen by 306,977 people in 26 towns with schools of design around the British Isles 2 . It ran a great network of schools of art and design – there were 151 by the time Cole died in 1851. And it was involved in the foundation of other museums – the Edinburgh Museum was founded in 1854, with a ‘regius keeper of technology’ as its keeper. Francis Fowke, a royal engineer on the department’s staff in South Kensington, designed both the museum in Edinburgh and the National Gallery of Ireland, founded in the same year before going on to build the first phase of the V&A from 1857-1865. The new organisation radiated energy and inspired imitation. The New York Herald wrote in 1871 ‘The model of the Metropolitan Museum of Art will … be that of the splendid museum in South Kensington … if we can succeed in establishing anything like the Kensington Museum in this city we shall be doing great work on behalf of civilization and education.’

The collections were there to teach and inspire practitioners and students of art and design. As the Art Journal wrote in 1869 ‘No artist of fertile imagination can pay a single visit to such a collection without experiencing a powerful and healthful stimulus to his creative power.’ The practice of drawing was considered to be of central importance. As George Wallis, curator of the Art Collections wrote ‘… the Art of Drawing involves the power to see objects correctly and to delineate them with accuracy’ so cultivating ‘the perceptive faculties of the Student’ and laying the basis for invention. But the museum was equally intended to educate the public as a whole directly through its library and lectures and indirectly through the exposure of the public to beautiful things in beautiful surroundings.

The initial incoherence of the collection found its expression in the incoherence of the South Kensington Museum’s buildings. The Brompton Boilers were supplemented by galleries to house John Sheepshanks’ gift of paintings, then the overflow from the National Gallery, the National Art Competitions, loan exhibitions and plaster casts. Development continued piecemeal until the end of the century when a competition to complete the museum was won by the architect Aston Webb. In her last public act Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the new building and agreed that it should be named after herself and her late husband ‘the Victoria and Albert Museum’. Coherence of content had also been gradually re-established as the nineteenth century wore on. The original ‘Art

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Museum’ gradually ejected the interlopers, some to the East End others across the road to what was to become the Science Museum, assuming the character familiar today. But that character is itself the product of divided intentions. Was the museum to continue as a resource for students and practitioners of art and design and an agent for sensitising a wide public to the causes and consequences of visual choice? Or was it, as became fashionable in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to become a temple for the contemplation of great art.

Henry Cole tended to the former, while J. C. Robinson and many of his successors, were drawn to the latter.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the ‘V&A’ as it was to become in 1899, turned its back on Cole’s vision of a museum for the general public, educated and uneducated alike. In 1880 ‘modern examples of Art manufacture’ were temporarily transferred to the newly established branch museum in Bethnal Green – not to be seen again in South Kensington for nearly a century.

An article in The Times mused on a change in public opinion which rendered it ‘painfully repugnant’ to connoisseurs to see modern design mixed up with the great art of the past. It was at about this time that the British Museum also ceased to collect contemporary prints and drawings – both museums had come to regard anything created in the last 100 years as beyond the pale.

Museums turned their back on the public and the public turned its back on museums. It was curious observed Charles Gibbs-Smith, who started work at the V&A in 1932 ‘to find how many museum officials [he characterised them as ‘status-seekers, anti-social scholars and stuff-pots’] either patronise, resent, despise, dislike, or even hate the public’. According to a report by Henry Miers which appeared in 1928 most museum displays were dingy, static and badly labelled and, as a result ‘most people in this country do not care for museums or believe in them’. When I arrived at the V&A in 2001 a friend who had worked there as Charles Gibbs-Smith’s successor in the 1980s asked me to go to the Ceramic galleries.

‘There is a big jug in the middle of the galleries’ he said ‘one of the most prominent exhibits…is the label still torn in half’. It was and must have been for more than quarter of a century, a fair gauge of the care which the Ceramic Department took to interpret its collections to the public.

In the second half of the twentieth century the pendulum swung back towards engagement with a wider public. Temporary exhibitions began to come back into fashion. The V&A had been the venue for two highly popular exhibitions

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immediately after the War, ‘Picasso – Matisse’ and ‘Britain Can Make It’. But in both cases the museum was the venue rather than the organiser.

Roy Strong’s directorship (1973-1987) saw a reengagement with contemporary design, particularly photography and fashion. ‘Visions of Japan’ in 1991 brought a very different aesthetic to London, while ‘Street Style’ (1994-1995) and ‘Radical Fashion’ (2001-2002) were intended to reach out to and involve some of those who explicitly reject mainstream culture. ‘Fashion in Motion’ and ‘Friday Lates’ attracted a younger crowd, while ‘Black British Style’ (2004-2005) and ‘Image and Identity’ helped young people to explore their own identity through museum collections and ‘Inspired By’ got people to create works of art inspired by works in museums in Sheffield, Manchester, Brighton, Tyne and Wear, Birmingham, Liverpool, Stoke and Stockport.

The late twentieth and early twenty first centuries have seen a real reversal of views about the relationship between the curatorial presentation of the collections and education and access. Approaches to label writing and text panels have been rethought, so that the interesting information comes first instead of last, recondite language is avoided or explained and the subliminal message that the uninformed were unwelcome has been rescinded. Temporary and travelling exhibitions – ‘Hats, Telling Tales’, ‘Decode’, ‘Shadow Catchers’ and the Jameel Prize brought design to a wider audience. In 2009 for the first time more people encountered the V&As around the world than came to the museum itself.

My belief is that the digital technology is as significant for availability and understanding of objects and images as the invention of movable type was for the availability and understanding of text. Before the invention of type most people encountered books only in sacred locations (and the parallel between museums and cathedrals has been so often drawn that it has become a commonplace), where they were interpreted by a priestly class. After the invention of type books became present in the home and in the schoolroom and people began to read the bible for themselves with sometimes uncomfortable results.

The V&A’s Kylie exhibition attracted tens of thousands of teenage girls who had never been into the museum before and the atmosphere was one of rapt and respectful attention. Many of them went on to see and enjoy other displays. It dealt with a key current forum for design – the design of celebrity. Yet it was criticised and even hated by some – who argued that association with the world of show biz demeaned and devalued the works of art elsewhere in the building.

There is an endless conflict between the fundamental biological desire for status

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and prestige, which comes from excluding the masses and concentrating on the highest status works of art and their appreciation by the elite. The V&A has been and will remain at the fulcrum of this battle because it deals with art and design with the useful and fine arts. It is always tempted to climb the ladder towards the higher status afforded by the useless, the rare and the precious and it is always being drawn back, by its origin and core purpose to the useful, the applied and the popular.

For those who are genuinely interested in increasing the usefulness of museums and making them welcoming to and used by the majority of the population the twenty-first century provides great opportunities. The spirit of the times is in our favour. Ours is an increasingly visual culture: one in which more and more communication works through images first and text second. Advertisers now expect consumers to decode images, which are as sophisticated and multi-layered as renaissance imprese. And technology allows images, and therefore objects, to be made available and shared in ways that were never possible before. Museums and galleries have used the new technology to good effect, as the impressive increase in user figures for their websites demonstrates – there are more than twenty million visits to the V&A website every year. And they are reaching a new audience – 20% of V&A website users have never been to the museum.

A recent survey conducted in England 3 showed that 54% of the population as a whole visit museums and in London, well provided as it is the figure is even higher at 60%. New approaches to display, the renewal and improvement of public facilities, all reflecting a fundamental shift in attitudes towards the public role of museums have seen visit numbers rise to the point that eight out of the top ten UK visitor attractions are museums. I do not want to argue that museums should dumb down, nor that it is necessarily their prime function to make people wise up, but trusted as they are to be guardians of beauty and talent and devotion it is incumbent on us to ensure that as many as possible receive pleasure and enlightenment from them.

THE V&A IN THE 21ST CENTURY The V&A must continue to be a compendious store of reference and ideas for practitioners and students of art and design. It needs to engage a wide public, drawn from a population that has links to and interests in every part of the globe and to make everyone think about design: about its impact on every aspect of our surroundings and about the choices that we make ourselves. To do so it needs to show and explain art and design from past and present and from many parts of the world. It has to be deeply informed about the cultures and context, the skills

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and traditions, that gave rise to the art of the past so that the present can learn from as well as enjoy what has been done before. It needs lively connections with traditional and radical design elsewhere to expand understanding of what is possible here. Its programme of exhibitions, courses and events must and does aim to gain and spread new understanding of the continually changing world of art and design. And so, increasingly the V&A can be encountered not only in London, but also elsewhere, in exhibitions that travel from San Francisco to Hong Kong, from Melbourne to Bilbao, from Mumbai to Moscow. On-line, through its publications and conferences it hopes to be, as Prince Albert intended, both a distinctively British institution and part of a world-wide community of those who believe that the things we surround ourselves with, our clothes, our homes, our tools and our towns reflect us only too accurately; embodying our feelings for each other and for the world we inhabit and capturing the purity or imperfections of the intentions that brought them into being. In short they are a mirror. We need to be able to look into that mirror and be proud of what we see.

Sir Mark Jones was Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 2001-2011

NOTES 1. This article is adapted from the Irish Museums Association Annual James White Memorial Lecture 2010 2. Driver, F. and Ashmore, S. (2010) The Mobile Museum. Victorian Studies 52: 353-385 3. The Active People survey is a national telephone survey about participation in sport. In 2008-2010 respondents to the survey were asked about their engagement in the arts, libraries and museums and galleries. See http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/researchand-data/arts-audiences/active-people-survey/

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A Time of Change: Rising to what challenges?

Peadar Kirby

INTRODUCTION 1 Few would dispute that we live in a time of crisis in today’s Ireland and beyond.

For this reason, it was very timely that the 2012 IMA conference considered the role that the museum sector can play in rising to the challenges of the present moment. Yet, all of this presupposes that we all agree on the nature of the contemporary crisis or crises. Can we even agree if we are facing a single or multiple crises; if the latter then what might be the interrelationship between them? And what are the causes of this crisis or these crises? Until we come to some common mind on these questions, then it is impossible to discuss what we should do about it all.

This article addresses the current situation we find ourselves in, distinguishing various layers and identifying how much of the crisis in Ireland is shared with other countries and how much is particular to ourselves. In other words, is the current crisis in Ireland a manifestation of a wider European or even global crisis, or might it be that some aspects of it are of our own provenance? The article then identifies various causes and argues that these signify that we live in a time of fundamental historical change, what social scientists call a change of social paradigm or a movement to a new historical period. The article ends by offering some reflections from an outsider on the possible role museums might play in this context.

CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS? There can be little argument but that our current Irish crisis is partly caused by a wider crisis of a particular type of capitalism, in which the financial sector began to play a central role in the creation of value especially since the deregulation and liberalisation of the sector that began in the US and Britain in the late 1970s and has since spread more widely around the world. However, in introducing mention of the wider global crisis, we need to remind ourselves that not all countries were seduced into the deregulation mania that has so devastated the Irish banking sector. For example, Canada and much of Latin America continued to regulate their banks robustly and so escaped the worst effects of the crisis. I was

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in Uruguay in 2009 when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued a report praising the Uruguayan government for the way it had regulating its banking sector. Similarly, of course, Asian giants like China and India continued to exercise close control over their banking systems. These observations raise very important questions about differences not only in regulatory practices but in the values that inform such governance and the origin of such values.

The current global crisis then originated in a financial sector that has grown immensely powerful, using sophisticated instruments to create value (as distinct from creating it from investing in the production of goods and services which was traditionally the principal role of the financial system in creating value) and building up mountains of debt in the process. It has been estimated that some 90 per cent of the global flows of capital over recent decades have been for speculative rather than productive purposes, a scary indicator of just how much the financial sector has come to dwarf the productive sectors of our economies and societies. As a result, therefore, a crisis in the financial sector immediately generated a wider crisis in the economy (in the case of Ireland some of the steepest declines in GNP ever experienced) and in society (a return to high unemployment and to social cutbacks, especially hitting the most vulnerable) both of which had come to depend so largely on speculative flows of capital. This much we share to a greater or lesser extent with many of the peripheral countries of Europe (Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Greece and the Baltic states), so that we can say that the financial crisis has generated a wider crisis of a particular model of development, what we often call neo-liberalism, characterised by state authorities being extremely friendly and even deferential to private market actors, particularly very powerful multinational companies.

A final dimension of the crisis we share with the international community, and one that tends to be forgotten since the onset of economic recession, is that we all face a potentially devastating environmental crisis. While this has many dimensions, two in particular stand out as requiring wrenching change in the ways we organise our economies and societies. Firstly, we face increasing energy costs as we pass peak oil and move into a period of declining supply while demand continues to increase, costs that ripple through our societies since so much of what we use depends on cheap oil. Secondly, we urgently need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we are to seek to avoid climate change that experts tell us could be catastrophic for us all. As I write this, I am reading in the media of scientists warning of a ‘planetary emergency’ due to the scale of the melting of the Arctic ice cap which is happening at a far more alarming speed that they had predicted. This environmental crisis will dwarf all of the other crises we face and

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yet as a human community we seem paralysed and unable to face the scale of what is being demanded of us. Nor is this unrelated to the other crises outlined earlier; some experts see the origin of the US sub-prime mortgage crisis that was the catalyst for the global banking crisis as being triggered by the increasing price of oil which made it too expense for US homeowners to live in estates that required extensive commuting leading to the collapse of prices in these suburban areas. Furthermore, the inexorable and very fast rise in oil prices undermines in a very fundamental way the prospects for recovery from the current recession.

WHAT IS PARTICULARLY OURS Two dimensions of the crisis (or perhaps it is better to call them two crises) are particular to Ireland and uniquely ours. Both of them relate to key institutions that structure Irish society. The first of these, which was revealed dramatically by the sudden collapse of the banks and the wider domestic economy, is a crisis of our political and administrative systems that have proven incapable of managing change and, indeed, must bear a significant responsibility for plunging us into the severe crisis we are in. There are various aspects to this crisis, including the localist nature of our electoral system and the types of legislators that emerge out of it, the extremely weak and fragmented nature of our local government system, the lack of real accountability of the executive which dominates a very tame legislature, and the closed and narrow circle of policy making, controlled by unaccountable civil servants, which fails to generated discursive debate on almost all aspects of public policy. This crisis was widely acknowledged for the first time at the 2011 general election when all parties vied with each other in proposing the most extensive set of reforms ever proposed to the Irish political system since independence. Progress in implementing them since has, however, been modest at best and evasive at worst as evidenced by the extremely limited set of issues that the constitutional convention is being asked to consider.

The other crisis particular to Ireland touches an even deeper component of our national life. This is the crisis deriving from the collapse of the authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland. While it is often linked to the revelations of the extensive physical and sexual abuse of children while in the care of church personnel, the crisis in itself goes much deeper and exposes the unaccountable and powerful clerical elite that had grown under the shadow of Catholicism as it came to reorganise itself after the tragedy of the Great Famine. Yet, though this is the crisis of one private institution, albeit a very powerful one in Irish society, the crisis also undermines the central core values that came to provide the Irish nation with a sense of separate identity following the dramatic decline of the

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Irish language over the course of the 19th century. For the independent state founded 90 years ago based its claim to nationhood much more on its Catholicism than on any other marks of distinctiveness from Britain. The crisis of Irish Catholicism raises therefore an insistent question of identity: who are we and what common values hold us together as a national community?

This article has therefore identified at least six serious crises that we are grappling with: financial, economic, social, environmental, political, and a crisis of values. But are these separate crises or are they linked to one another? Is it possible to seek to resolve each separately or do we have to address them together? In other words, are they separate discrete crisis of different aspects of our social model, or do they signify that the model itself is in crisis? Due to the fragmentation of knowledge into different disciplines and our socialisation through these disciplines as taught in formal education, we have the tendency to see a political crisis as being distinct from an economic crisis, the environmental crisis as being distinct from a crisis of values. However, as we live our lives in society, such differentiation comes to look very abstract. We cannot separate the fact that our banking sector acted in reckless and socially irresponsible ways from the nature of how the political and regulatory system operated nor from the values that both motivated the bankers and were acquiesced in by society more widely.

We cannot understand the environmental crisis if we fail to understand the options made by policy makers to promote car usage over investment in public transport, options that were also driven by the demands of citizens and have resulted in the transport sector becoming one of the worst culprits in terms of carbon emissions. We therefore need to see our crises as manifestations of a particular social model or paradigm, a particular way we have organised our production, distribution, mobility and governance, based on particular values about the individual and society, the common good, our relationship with nature and many other aspects of our common lives. In Ireland, as everywhere else, the way in which the crisis of paradigm manifests is coloured by our particular colonial past, our distinctive history, our party system, our economy so highly dependent as it is on foreign investment, and many other factors. Some of these factors, as stated above, require particular attention over and above the dimensions of the global crisis; they also, however, create opportunities to fashion new common values to see us through what is going to be a very challenging time of the most fundamental economic, social, political and cultural change that now faces humanity.

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CAUSES Identifying the nature of the various crises facing us and the ways in which they are deeply interconnected does not take us very far in identifying what we need to do to address them. For this, we need a sharper focus on the causes.

Unfortunately, there is a tendency among commentators to moralise about the causes rather than to engage in a more rigorous analysis: how often we hear it said that it was the fault of greedy bankers and property developers, lax regulators and lazy politicians who were hand in glove with those making large sums of money. All of this may be correct but the basic cause of our crisis goes much deeper, though of course the values that motivated some of the actions that led to the crisis is not an irrelevant part of the story. The problem with focusing on the greed of elites is that it exonerates society of any blame, as if the rest of us were neutral bystanders playing no role in electing the politicians who ran the system, in benefiting from the surge of consumerism that was fuelled by the easy lending practices of the banks, in failing to raise critical voices or in actively rubbishing as begrudging those that were raised, and in allowing the wave of national hubris carry us along. For, a more critical, vigilant and mobilised citizenry could have exercised real influence to help avoid the more destructive outcomes.

More than individual moralising, what is needed is an examination of the structural nature of the crisis situation we are in. As mentioned in passing already, this can be identified as a particular kind of capitalism that Irish authorities embraced uncritically and in far too naïve a way. Much has been written about the Irish crisis that has given us detailed insight into the ways our authorities did this, but there has been less focus on the structures of power in which they are enmeshed. In our book 2 Mary Murphy and I focus on the political economy model that structured the interrelationship between the public authority or power of the state and the private power of capital, particularly large multinational capital which exercises such a powerful sway over Irish policy makers and politicians. The third form of power we focus on is that of civil society and we identify the ways it was co-opted and made quite powerless in challenging the subservience of politics to the needs of private capital to make huge profits in Ireland and export much of the gains made. Most of us simply go along with this and fail to raise it as an issue to be debated. As we write, ‘every society is structured not only by its political system but, much more profoundly, by its political economy model, namely the ways in which state, market and society interrelate to one another and thereby largely determine the shape of that society – whose interests the economy predominantly serves, the strength or weakness of redistributive mechanisms, the nature of the public realm and the values underpinning it and, ultimately, the quality of life for the majority’ 3. More than

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anything else, debate about the crisis and its resolution needs to focus on different political models – the one that landed us in the mess we are in, and ones we need to build to give us a more just, more equal, more humane and more sustainable future.

In the book, we identify three models that are competing for dominance in today’s Irish society. The first is a reformed version of the model that led us into the crisis, what we term a weak liberal model. It is weak because it does not set robust goals either in terms of social provision or of environmental protection and basically aspires to regulate somewhat better the financial sector in the hope of returning quickly to economic growth and the distribution of the benefits it brings. We identify two of our leading political parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, much of the private business sector, and wider sections of civil society as supporting such an option. The strongest reformist option we label a developmentalist social democratic model, aspiring to a stronger indigenous economy that could generate the resources for better public services and infrastructure, addressing the legacy of poverty and inequality that was never adequately addressed during the boom, and laying the foundations for a qualitative change in Irish society. We identify sectors of the Irish left, particularly the Labour Party, the trade union movement, and wide sectors of organised civil society (such movements as Claiming our Future as well as many NGOs that work with the marginalised and deprived both at home and abroad), as espousing such a model. However, we identify another alternative model that is also supported by some sectors, what we label an ethical or ecological socialism. This recognises the huge challenges posed by the need to move to a carbon-neutral economy and society, and drastically to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, especially oil. As such it espouses a steady-state economy in which the emphasis would not be on growth but on the better distribution of the wealth we have, on taxing ecological pollution rather than human labour, on resourcing as much as possible of our needs from our local region, on developing public transport to replace the private car, and on ensuring we minimise as quickly as possible hugely destructive impacts on the environment. This option is espoused by some in the Green Party and by various environmental NGOs and social movements. As the ecological challenges become ever more obvious and urgent, we expect it to emerge as a more viable option with wider support. By focusing our attention on political economy models, we hope to focus on the options facing society and on the interrelated nature of the dimensions that we require to address the lay the foundations for a more sustainable future.

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BACK TO BASICS: ROLE OF MUSEUMS Let me end by moving outside my specialist area to address the concerns of the IMA. What might be the role of museums in this context of crisis? I was delighted when I read that the logo of the former Anglo-Irish Bank, once it was taken down from the bank’s headquarters on St Stephens Green in Dublin, was donated to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. This seems to be entirely appropriate as museums are the institutions that gather the raw materials of our past, distant and recent, out of which we build a new future. In doing this, museums over the past century have been under pressure to focus more on the past rather than on building our future. However, if we look at the role of museums in the 19th century, they focused much more on celebrating what was being done to build a future, particularly in terms of the development of industry. Museums therefore need to return to a sense of the unity of culture, science, industry that seemed to mark that earlier period, providing a more holistic vision of what creates a society.

Museums should challenge us to see the good, the bad and the ugly in ourselves, rather than confining themselves to some elite ‘cultural’ sphere of activity. Why could we not have exhibitions, for example, that focus on the achievements of indigenous industries and services, including the state sector, to counterbalance the extreme dependence on multinationals that characterises our policy makers and public attitudes? Let us show what we achieved for ourselves to stimulate us to do it again. Why not gather the familiar religious iconography with which many of us grew up, ugly and mass-produced as much of it was, as a way of holding up a mirror to a fundamental part of our public culture for so long? In this way, museums could allow us look at the familiar in a new way, helping us achieve a critical distance with which to look more critically at what has made us what we are. Why not exhibitions on urban and transport systems and planning, on our forms of agriculture and landholding, on our local governance structures and institutions, on civil society movements for change and their impacts? In moving into the decade of commemoration of the events of a century ago that opens in 2012, museums face a fundamental option: do they celebrate the actions of the past or hold them up as values, ideals, movements and actions that help us judge the society of the present? There is so much of what formed us as we now are that seems to lose its living dynamism once it becomes reduced to museum artifacts. The challenge is to bring us in contact in an invigorating way with something of the lived experience of the recent past, but to do so in a way that releases a rich social creativity, that stimulates a social imagination, that prompts to action for change. Of course, educational institutions, particularly universities, can debate these issues, but they always do so within structures of interpretation that provide an already packaged meaning. What universities can-

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not do is to assemble the lived fragments of that past in a way that does not foreclose imagination or interpretation but stimulates and encourages it. We badly need museums that take on the challenge to be artisans of a new society, helping open pathways towards alternative futures.

Peadar Kirby is Professor Emeritus of International Politics and Public Policy, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick NOTES 1. This article is based on a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, Rising to the challenge, on 25 February 2012, Limerick 2. Kirby, P. and Murphy, M.P. (2011) Towards a Second Republic: Irish politics after the Celtic Tiger Pluto Press, London.

3. Kirby, P. and Murphy, M.P. (2011) p. 201

Laurence Street Drogheda Co. Louth T: 041-9803311, F: 041-9803313, W: www.highlanes.ie Opening Hours: Monday – Saturday: 10.30am – 5.00pm Closed Sundays Free Admission

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Staying relevant in spite of it all Michael Starrett

SUMMARY 1 No one working in, or part of, the museum sector needs to be reminded of its significance. This short paper, in focusing on the Heritage Council’s Strategic Plan 2012-2016 2, seeks to point the way to help us all to communicate to others that significance and to encourage them to value it to the same extent as the audience at the annual conference. It also seeks to make the point that museums and galleries need to rise to the challenge and remain relevant all the time and not just in a time of change.

As one of the ‘non-collecting’ Cultural Institutions the Heritage Council has had the advantage of working with those primarily Dublin-based entities whilst at the same time reaching out to the museum community throughout Ireland. The Council’s development of the Museums Standards Programme, establishment of formally recognised training for the sector in Ireland, maintenance of the cross border Museums Award, providing support for Irish based conservation internships and of course its general grants programme represent some of the best known landmarks. This infrastructure and support has all been predicated on helping the sector to develop a quality and standard within the sector of which Ireland can be proud.

At a time when the Council itself is under ‘critical review’ with the objective of determining how best to abolish it or merge it in to the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht much of what has been achieved risks being ‘abandoned and the rest politicised’ 3. Notwithstanding this critical review the Council has published its new Strategic Plan 2012 -2016 which details 16 Key Objectives for 2016. These focus on the themes most relevant to the contribution the sector can make to our national economic and social recovery in terms of supporting employment, education and awareness and of course the quality of our heritage tourism. New research detailing the value of our historic environment is presented.

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INTRODUCTION In the 16 years since it was established the Heritage Council has worked with a range of communities, sectoral interests and individuals, and has carved out a unique niche that operates in an empowering, enabling and facilitating way. It does not designate, impose nor control but rather works hand in hand with all its partners. This in many ways reflects the views expressed by Paul Doyle, Chairman of the Irish Museums Association, at the opening event of the its Annual Conference in Limerick, namely that our relationship is much more than just one of giver and receiver of grant. We provide mutual support towards the achievement of what are undoubtedly common goals regarding the care and conservation of collections and the engagement of the public in that work.

Together the Council and these partners and communities have created new and innovative ways of working that complement the more established and centralised and necessary state heritage services. We have together enabled and encouraged investment in, and the realisation of the potential of, our national heritage to contribute to economic, social and environmental recovery.

The heritage infrastructure that the Heritage Council and its partners have developed is extensive, too extensive to consider in this short paper. However it results in influence and action on international obligations, primary legislation, statutory instruments, policy proposals, best practice, training and a whole range of support programmes such as the Heritage Officer Network, the Irish Walled Towns Network, Heritage in Schools, Heritage week, The Landmark Trust, The Discovery Programme to say nothing of our on-going grants programme. In partnership with the museum community the Museums Standards Programme, establishment of formally recognised training for the sector in Ireland, maintenance of the cross-border Museums Award, providing support for Irish based conservation internships and of course the general grant’s programmes represent some of the best known landmarks.

In all of this the most important thing is not so much what is being done, but the process and manner by which it is done, that is with a focus on community, meaningful participation, flexibility, and innovation to help meet the needs of people to manage, conserve and develop their heritage. What separates the heritage infrastructure developed by the Heritage Council from the infrastructure delivered by most grant givers is that it is based on ‘people’ and not bricks and mortar or tarmacadam.

If, In the government’s own words, we are to believe that the current public

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sector reform programme is driven by a desire to recognise that networks and communities are essential in delivering better government as they provide mechanisms to influence, gather information, disseminate best practice and promote integrated approaches and collaboration then one would be fully justified in thinking that for the heritage sector ‘our time has come’.

Objectives for 2016 which are applied to four key areas l Supporting Employment l Supporting Education l Supporting Quality Heritage Tourism l Modern Frameworks and Mechanisms

Then why, irony of ironies, in the week that an Irish Times editorial 4 recognised that a centralised responsibility for protection of heritage assets was an important legislative advance ‘at the time’, is the Heritage Council itself, a body that was established to develop the imaginative communities beyond that centralised approach, under critical review with a view to the centralisation of its functions in to a Government Department?

All of these are directly relevant to the Irish Museums Association and its members, and indeed as the 50 members of the Museums Standards Programme will shortly find out one of those 16 Key Objectives relates specifically to them. The Minister acknowledges in his opening statement for our new Plan that there is an ongoing critical review of the Heritage Council and commits to it being completed quickly. A decision is due to be taken by Government in June 2012.

Notwithstanding the government decision to merge the functions of the Heritage Council in to the Department, the Heritage Council is very clear in its view that any such merger would remove the very levers upon which its success is predicated – namely a creative and imaginative and independent board and an organisational culture that has allowed it to establish confidence and credibility by working creatively with communities to support them in meeting their needs.

President Michael D. Higgins in his inauguration speech called for new imagination and for those creative communities to help us emerge from our current difficulties as a people. It was that very same President who, in 1995 as Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht brought the Heritage Act to realisation and who appointed the first members to the Council. In all that has happened in the intervening years, and whilst remaining flexible and relevant to the circumstance of the day the Council has never wavered from the basic commitment to work with and support a whole range of communities.

The Minister acknowledges that regardless of the outcome of the review the objectives set in this Strategic Plan will help guide delivery of key heritage services over the next 5 years. If I was being exceedingly optimistic I could say that this really is staying relevant ‘in spite of it all’ – that is, we have shaped key heritage services for the future. However no one in the Heritage Council will be content to have left that legacy. We are too young to die and no epitaph has been written. We want to be part of the implementation and delivery mechanisms as a separate and independent entity with its own identity and not merged into a government department. The Council is working exceptionally hard to secure that independence.

To allow it to do that it has not followed the traditional model of development for public sector agencies which tends to see them grow exponentially as bureaucracies, moving further and further away from the communities and the public they are deemed to serve. Rather Council has maintained a small core staff of 15 in Kilkenny that has facilitated the development of a range of community based models and infrastructure right the way around the country that are firmly embedded in meeting community needs. These now support 70 jobs directly of which 66% are in the private sector.

16 OBJECTIVES FOR 2016 On Thursday 1st March 2012 Minister Jimmy Deenihan TD launched the Heritage Council’s Strategic Plan 2012-2016. In that Plan Council set out 16

Our intent is that the review finds Council to represent all that is good in a modern and reformed public service and that its independence, culture and ability to implement and deliver its public service remain very much part of the heritage scene. In the short term we need to survive the review, work hard to achieve that and yet focus also on our medium and long term aspirations. Council needs your help to do just that. Individual Council members and staff each have their action plans of people to contact and events to attend. Others too can play a part.

A key aspiration in the new Plan as articulated by Conor Newman, Chairperson of the Heritage Council, is to take the infrastructure that has been imagined, supported and created in 15 short years, make it greater than the sum of its parts and shape it into a heritage sector – one with a cogent, coherent and powerful voice. The Council also needs help to do that. In a recent edition of Heritage Outlook I stated that the use of the term ‘heritage sector’ was an interesting one.

I begged the question does such really exist or is it just a series of fragmented interests that shelter occasionally under a ‘heritage’ flag of convenience. I came

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to the conclusion that if you looked at our traditional structures then the flag of convenience analogy was most likely correct. I suggested the structures needed to change to become much more integrated and less fragmented, to make them fit for purpose and relevant to people in today’s circumstances. The optimist in me would say let us take that view and help the ‘sector’ work collectively to shape it in to the ‘overarching political vision that links a knowledge and appreciation of the past with the provision of jobs, local development and a better future…’ that an Irish Times editorial says is lacking.

with your community to make the heritage sector become the cogent, coherent and powerful voice that our future generations will require.

Michael Starrett is Chief Executive of The Heritage Council NOTES 1.

This paper is based on a presentation at the IMA Annual Conference in Limerick in 2012.

2.

Heritage Council, 2012. Strategic Plan 2012-2016. The Heritage Council, Kilkenny

3.

SOME FACTS TO HELP The Heritage Council will publish recent research and reiterate some older figures that highlight the value of our heritage in economic terms. Please do not lambast me for selling out on the intrinsic non-economic value of our heritage – that is simply not the case and anyone who reads our strategic plan will see how we have stayed true to our main purpose in articulating a vision that: ‘…the value of our heritage is enjoyed, managed and protected for the vital contribution it makes to our identity, well-being and future.’

However some headline figures may well be of assistance in making our case in the weeks and months to come: l Including indirect and induced effects, it is estimated that the historic environment sector supports 40,000 full-time equivalent employment positions in Ireland. l In terms of contribution to national income, Ireland’s historic environment is estimated to account for some ¤1.5 billion to the nation’s Gross Value Added (GVA). l Within the context of Ireland’s economy, it is estimated that the historic environment contributes some 2% of overall employment. l In 2010, Heritage Council projects alone attracted approximately 18,700 tourists. l In 2010, the Heritage Council grants fund of ¤6.2m supported an estimated 449 jobs. ­ported the creation of 1,012 full-time jobs in small businesses, with an estimated return of ¤30.1m to the economy, leading to an additional investment of around ¤10m from other sources CONCLUSION In the next weeks, months days and years we all have our work cut out to stay relevant in spite of it all. The Heritage Council fully intends to be there to work

O’Toole, F. 2011. Never mind slashed budgets: mindless mergers are the arts' big problem.

Irish Times 3 December 2011 4.

Editorial. Irish Times 20 February 2012

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Challenging museums and challenging purposes Elizabeth Crooke INTRODUCTION 1 Consideration of museum purpose has been core to Irish Museums Association conferences over the years. Within discussions of issues such as sustainability, audiences and public policy, a concern with museum meanings has always been central. A time of challenge, and the global economic crisis is an occasion, or even opportunity, to think deeply about the raison d’être and for museums to become confident in museums as an essential service.

The theme of my paper is to reflect upon how the purpose of museums has been presented in the last decade or so and ask what consequences this has for us under current economic conditions. In this paper I raise ideas with regard to exploring and challenging museums. Our purpose should be evolving, it should take on new ways of thinking and we should always be aware of the social, cultural and political context in which we are working.

THE MCCAUSLAND CONTROVERSY I would like to begin with a recent accusation of ‘political interference’ in Northern Ireland museums which some of you may be aware of. In 2010 the Ulster Museum in Belfast was drawn into public controversy because the opinions of the Minister for Culture, Mr Nelson McCausland. As a result of a leaked internal document it came to public attention that McCausland requested that the natural history galleries should include consideration of creationism – the belief that the earth is 6,000 years old. McCausland also asked that the history galleries should give greater prominence to Ulster Scots, the Orange Order and the plantation of Ulster.

This controversy was profiled in the local newspapers, radio and television. A record of it can still be found online and extensively in McCausland’s blog. Let me provide you with a flavour of the coverage: the Belfast Telegraph described McCausland’s intervention as ‘Ministerial meddling’. Mark Taylor, director of the UK Museums Association is cited saying that, even after working in museums for over 20 years ‘I can’t recall in the UK an example of such blatant political interference’.2 On the MA website Taylor described this as ‘unacceptable political interference’.3

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There is a case to be made that all visitor feedback should be valued by museums; but, unique about this example, it is the Minister of the Department responsible for the museum making the observations. During the months that followed I was very aware of the intense pressure his opinions placed upon Ulster Museum staff – a pressure to respond and to justify the galleries. Our political ministers come and go and get different portfolios and, on the face of it at least, this particular controversy seems to have faded away with the change of Minister. In May 2011 a new Minister was appointed to DCAL. With this change we have a very different political outlook – will that be evident in the running of Department of Culture Arts and Leisure and its related institutions?

What this case demonstrates is how vulnerable museums are to the political context. We may wish to think that political parties maintain an ‘arms length principle’ in relation our museums and cultural institutions. Is that naive? This recent controversy is a fairly blatant example, and not typical of the links between Government and culture. However, we must ask, are there more subtle ways that government agendas are embedded in the work and practices of museums?

INSTRUMENTALISM AND CULTURAL POLICY Internationally the relationship between government and museums is a key issue. For instance, during the New Labour period in the UK, when the Department of Culture, Media and Sport issued a policy on social cohesion, inclusion or diversity, museums responded with their contribution. As a result we had almost a decade of social policy aimed at the cultural sector and concentrated efforts of those in museums, archives and libraries to respond. Those familiar with the UK sector will remember the impact reports such as New Directions in Social Policy,4 Bringing Communities together through Sport and Culture,5 and Culture at the Heart of Regeneration6 had on the work and practices of museums.

With such policy direction, museums were being asked to demonstrate their relevance to society through community projects and the sector did so. To not do so, would risk giving the impression that museums were elitist, not promoting access, and disinterested in the life-experiences and needs of their potential visitors. The areas of concern were social cohesion, security, health, public participation and museum managers were invited to demonstrate measurable results against such indicators.7 Later consultancy groups and academics made quite a business measuring and evaluating the success of such projects.

It has been argued (often by the other academics and cultural critics) that by par-

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ticipating in social programmes museums were directly linking themselves to social and political agendas of government, whether that was during the period of Thatcher or, later, that of Blair.

has been an over reliance on ‘measurable outcomes’, Belfiore and Bennett assert that ‘economics can have little to tell us about their intrinsic value’. Finally they also warn against assuming that gathering such impacts can safeguard and increase government funding of the arts.

It is this debate that is fundamental to the concerns about instrumentalism in relation to the cultural sector. Instrumental policy is understood as that which uses culture as a ‘means or instrument to attain goals in areas other than cultural areas’.8 These have been described as occasions when there is a ‘diversion of primary intention away from the core specifics of a policy sector and towards the interests and concerns of other policy sectors’.9 It has been also suggested that instrumental policy was driven by uncertainty 10 – maybe at times of uncertainly Government ministers will ask more of the sectors they are responsible for and those in the sector will, in turn, do more to respond. Pinned to this is the accusation of museums were being used for the delivery of ‘politically motivated social and cultural agendas that threaten their objectivity and neutrality’.11 The social policy agenda is not always externally motivated. Within the cultural sector, linking museums and arts with social policy has been referred to in the literature as ‘policy attachment’. These are occasions when those working within the cultural sector associate their own activities with those of another sector. The motivation to do so may be to gain access to scarce resources; provide evidence of the positive impact in order to maintain funding; 12 or to provide political credibility which may otherwise lacking.

What is the potential harm of such connections? Clive Gray, reflecting on the associations, posits: ‘At the very least this indicates the rather obvious point that cultural services are seen as having an impact across more than their own sectorial concerns. At the worst it could mean that these exogenous effects are the only ones that are seen as being of importance in assessing organizational effectiveness in the museums and galleries sector’.13 Belfiore and Bennett argue that involving cultural practice with social policy has ‘come at a cost’ and not been helpful for arts and culture.14 They are critical of assumptions within government policy of what ‘arts’ and ‘culture’ comprises, stated there is no shared understanding and no sense of what it is that should be measured or evaluated. They query statements which they perceive as over-generalising people’s experiences of the arts. They disagree with over simplified assumptions that arts ‘can transform lives and communities’. Stating that there

The debate concerning instrumentalism has caused us, again, to reflect upon the purposes of museums. The counter-argument to this ‘open season attack’ has a number of strands. There are those who will present instrumentalism in cultural policy as ‘nothing remotely new’ – the development of mid-nineteenth century museums in England were seen as a ‘healthy alternative’ associated with education and industry. Others ask, ‘did the attack go too far?’ As one employee noted ‘museums are being asked to address the needs of the communities they serve, not to sacrifice their collections’.15 The dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic factors can be described as a false one. What is intrinsic to the museum and what could be referred to as lead by, or imposed by, external factors? 16 Can we say that the sector has ‘attached’ itself to irrelevant policy or is it adopting a more democratic approach? Surely, it is well established by now that the learning and outreach programmes, often linked to social initiatives, are grounded as core museum activities. And now, on reflection, have we not got a lot to thank the social policy agenda for? It has encouraged more of us to think more deeply about purposes, audiences and priorities. As noted by Mark O’Neill, social inclusion was about providing more points of entry into cultural spaces; about sharing an enriching experience; and about fairness and equity.17 SOME FINAL POINTS I would add that this rethinking of museum purposes in the past decades has not only been driven by the social policy agenda; it has also been stimulated by the changes in how we study objects and histories. Cultural theory has asked us to consider how meanings are made, how cultures are interpreted and represented, and the power embodied in cultural practice. With the adoption of ‘new museology’ there has been a ‘radical reassessment of the role of museums in society’. 18 For me, that is also part of how we have changed the way we think about and practice in museums. In the current context of austerity, it seems almost a luxury to be concerned with the social and cultural policies of the past decade and the comments of a local Minister. Almost every week email notifications from the UK Museums Association tell of another museum facing closure or a collection sold. February 2012 there was a concern that the collection of the Wedgwood Museum could be sold to fund a £134 million pension deficit. At the National Gallery in London, 2012 was greeted by strikes due to reduced staffing in the galleries. In the context of such challenges museums need to be confident

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in their core business, prepared to innovate, and must keep the community at the heart of what they do. Each area of museum work needs to be met and balanced with the other, if one is to be achieved. It is in that balance that possibilities lie.

Dr Elizabeth Crooke is Senior Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of Ulster

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NOTES This article is adapted from a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, Rising to the challenge on 25 February 2012, Limerick Belfast Telegraph 27 May 2010 Accessed 31 August 2011 http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ breaking-news/ukandireland/museums-chief-slams-northern-ireland-interference14820787.html. See also http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/creationism -v-evolution-showdown-at-the-ulster-museum-14821031.html http://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/26052010-ulster-museumcreationism Accessed 31 August 2011 New Directions in Social Policy, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, 2004 Bringing Communities together through Sport and Culture, Department of Culture Media and Sport, 2004 Culture at the Heart of Regeneration, Department of Culture Media and Sport, 2004 Listed by Levitt, R. (2008) The political and intellectual landscape of instrumental museum policy. Cultural Trends 17(4): 223-231 (page 223) Vestheim (1994:65) cited by Gray (2008) Instrumental policies: causes, consequences, museums and galleries. Cultural Trends 17(4): 209-222 (p.210) Gray 2008 (p.211) Levitt 2008 Houlihan, M., quoted in West C. and Smith, C.H.F. (2005) ‘‘We are not a government poodle’ Museums and Social Inclusion under New Labour. International Journal of Cultural Policy 11(3): 275-288 MacNaught, B. (2005) Commentary. In Selwood S. ‘John Holden's Capturing Cultural Value: How Culture has Become a Tool of Government Policy’ Cultural Trends 14(1): 113-128 Gray 2008, p.210 Belfiore, E. and Bennett, O. (2007) Rethinking the social impact of the arts. International Journal of Cultural Policy 13 (2):135-151 (p.137) West, C. and Smith, C.H.F. (2005) ‘We are not a government poodle’ Museums and Social Inclusion under New Labour. International Journal of Cultural Policy 11(3): 281 Gibson, L. 2008. ‘In defence of instrumentality’ in Cultural Trends 16(4): 247-257 (p. 251) O’Neill, M. (2005) Commentary. In Selwood, S. ‘John Holden's Capturing Cultural Value: How Culture has Become a Tool of Government Policy’ Cultural Trends 14(1): 113-128 Davis quoted by Mason, R. (2006) Cultural theory and museum studies. In Macdonald, S.

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(ed.) A Companion to Museum Studies. Blackwell Publishing

Ireland’s Heritage and Culture: A Principal Driver of Tourism Growth?

Aidan Pender TOURISM CONTEXT 1 Tourism is one of Ireland’s largest indigenous industries. It employs almost 185,000 people who work in some 17,000 firms across the country. It is sometimes referred to as ‘an industry of every parish’ because of its extremely dispersed nature and its capacity to generate economic activity across a broad regional spread. This dispersion feature is an attribute of tourism globally and is in effect inherent in the nature of the industry. This is particularly so in Northern European destinations where the visitor motivation is less likely to be based on an expectation of a sun-holiday in a fixed location. Unlike other industries therefore (for example financial services), tourism tends not to cluster in one location and so has a greater capacity for wealth dispersal and regional employment creation. These attributes also explain why tourism in Ireland can draw a considerable level of political interest.

At an international level, tourism statistics are usually collected on the basis of a business activity cluster known as ‘Hotels, Restaurants and Bars’ (often presented under the acronym HBR). Whilst perfectly understandable in terms of facilitating the collection of statistics, this is a somewhat unfortunate approach as it tends to overlook a whole range of other retailing and transactional arrangements in which tourists engage. It also has the unfortunate effect of perpetuating the mistaken view that HBR is tourism whereas in reality it is simply a subset of the industry.

Indeed as a service industry, tourism can be broken into two parts. There is night-time tourism from 8.00pm to 8.00am, comprised essentially of accommodation, food and entertainment – in other words a classic HBR cluster. There is also daytime tourism from 8.00am to 8.00pm comprised essentially of activities and attractions, and things to see and do. It is at least arguable that Irish tourism has particular strengths in the former, and in many respects these elements constitute the spine of the tourism sector. It is also arguable that the principal development agenda for Irish tourism lies in the latter where overseas visitors in particular wish to find an authentic set of experiences rooted in a sense of place that is uniquely Irish.

This distinction is more than merely a quibble of the tourism pedant. It is central to understanding the needs of the tourist as a consumer. In this regard it is important to understand the distinction between the primary and secondary drivers of tourism. For example few people leave their own home and country just to sleep in a hotel bed somewhere else, to take a bus journey somewhere else, or to drink a cup of coffee somewhere else. These things, isolated and of themselves, are unlikely to serve as a primary source of tourism demand. That primary source of tourism demand is more widely acknowledged to lie in the idea of ‘things to see and do’. In particular, people visit another country because they want to experience the distinctiveness and difference of that place, to experience the sense of place and lifestyle in that country, and to get a sense of the authentic real feeling of the place. Research tells us that increasingly visitors want to encounter an ‘immersive experience’ rather than consume a homogenous and commoditised product.

This suggests therefore that these elements of an immersive experience – authenticity, distinctiveness, and a sense of place – are the sources of primary demand that can drive tourism growth. Destinations that get these things right and that are really competent in allowing visitors access to these experiences, will of necessity backfill the tourism spine of hotels, restaurants, and bars. These will always serve as a focus of secondary demand and will only emerge once the requirements represented in the primary demand are met. In other words, a hotel located in a fundamentally uninteresting place is more likely to remain empty over time. Notwithstanding this observation however, the HBR set tends to be among the larger and economically better resourced layers within tourism, and as such can capture quite a lot of public and political attention. By contrast it is more difficult for a kayaking school, surf school, art gallery, regional theatre or craft jeweller to capture the same level of attention. Yet more attention for this latter sector, and this source of primary demand, is required if we are to continue to give overseas visitors reasons to come to Ireland. Irish heritage and culture are an extremely important element in this story.

Overseas visitors are at the top of the tourism hierarchy. In this particular respect, Irish tourism (in so far as it can attract overseas visitors to come to Ireland) is an active and important export sector within the Irish economy.

Furthermore to the extent that Irish tourism is successful in doing this, it generates net incremental cash-flow into the Irish economy and so sustains thousands of people in employment and in turn sustains the communities in which those people live. In 2011, 6.6 million trips were taken to Ireland by non-residents (i.e.

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overseas visitors). In aggregate the non-resident visitors taking these trips spent ¤3,580 million in the Irish economy. Without this cash injection into the Irish economy, employment levels within the economy would have been considerably lower. The hanging question therefore is whether these overseas visitors were rewarded or frustrated by their experience in Ireland.

above the secondary reason of booking a hotel bed.

This thinking around culture and heritage finds a very practical resonance in the real world also. Fáilte Ireland’s annual Visitor Attitude Survey 4 presents significant support for the view that culture and heritage can serve as a driving force behind tourism consumer demand in Ireland. For example, when visitors are asked about the primary motivator that prompted them to visit Ireland, 41% say the ‘Irish people’, 24% say ‘scenery’, and 18% say ‘culture/history’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few say hotels, restaurants or bars. Equally when visitors are asked to rate the positive aspects of an Irish holiday experience (securing a satisfaction rating of at least 85% or higher), ‘interesting history and culture’ regularly exceed the 85% pass mark.

TOURISM AND HERITAGE – WHO NEEDS WHOM? A review of the literature on tourism patterns in Europe in recent decades suggests that the two dominant drivers of tourism movements in Europe are Mediterranean Beaches and Alpine Ski-slopes. Despite having neither of these facilities, Irish tourism punches above its weight in European terms. Accordingly therefore it would seem useful to identify the cause behind this Irish tourism performance.

One strong candidate to answer this question lies in the binding feature which unites much of Europe as the ‘Old Continent’ – that is heritage and culture. A recent OECD report on the impact of culture on tourism introduced the subject in the following terms: ‘Cultural tourism is one of the largest and fastest-growing global tourism markets. Culture and creative industries are increasingly being used to promote destinations and enhance their competitiveness and attractiveness. Many locations are now actively developing their tangible and intangible cultural assets as a means of developing comparative advantage in an increasingly competitive tourism marketplace, and to create local distinctiveness in the face of globalisation.’2 What is particularly interesting in the text quoted above is the co-location of the vocabulary of culture and the vocabulary of business, In order to emphasise this co-location of vocabulary, some of the business terminology is presented in red.

For example, language such as ‘competitiveness’, ‘distinctiveness’, ‘comparative advantage’ and ‘tangible and intangible cultural assets’ could have come straight out of the pages of Michael Porter’s seminal work on international competitive advantage. 3 Yet somewhat unusually the source of this particular competitive advantage is stated to be in ‘culture and creative industries’ as opposed to more conventional sources such as the car industry, steel making, or pharmaceuticals.

More pointedly in the context of this paper is the fact that ‘culture and creative industries’ represent very real opportunities, in tourism terms, to create and support distinctive destinations. In other words these are tourism destinations which possess some authentic or distinctive attributes which in turn provide strong and compelling reasons for overseas tourists to visit – that is over and

This of course raises the question as to what is understood by the term ‘heritage and culture’. In this regard it might be supposed that for some overseas respondents to the Visitor Attitude Survey, drinking in a pub in mid-afternoon in Temple Bar could come within the ambit of Irish ‘heritage and culture’. Equally though it is reasonable enough to assume that this might not be a prevalent or ubiquitous response. In framing a response to this question, Fáilte Ireland tends to cluster around four principal ‘engines’ of tourism demand as follows: Natural Heritage – which includes the natural endowment of ocean, cliffs, rivers, lakes, beaches, mountains, forests and countryside which support traditional tourism ‘products’ such as walking, cycling, angling, boating, surfing, kayaking, golfing, and touring.

Built Heritage – which includes locations such as Newgrange (Brú na Bóinne), the Ceide Fields, Spike Island, Kilkenny Castle, Castletown House and Georgian Dublin.

Cultural Heritage – which includes everything from Peig Sayers through James Joyce to U2. This embraces traditional and contemporary musical culture, literature and theatre traditions, oral story-telling, the Irish language, folklore and legend, Irish sport and the GAA, traditional lifestyles, and even the ‘logainmeacha’ through which the traditional Irish place-names around the country tell the story of a particular place (which very often has been lost in the Anglicisation of the Gaelic place-name) The Irish People – although it can at times appear somewhat superficial and selfserving, the fact remains that engaging with Irish people emerges as a recurring theme in all surveys of visitors to Ireland. Indeed the ease with which visitors

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can interact with Irish people (in a non-contrived and spontaneous context) remains one of the primary determinants of a positive holiday experience in Ireland.

tourism services are supplied to the consumer. On the ‘demand side’ however where the consumer encounters the real destination experience, there a great many autonomous and more influential agents at play. These agents can have a direct and powerful influence on the visitor and the tourism experience. This situation is summarised in Figure 1.

Tourism therefore tends to approach ‘heritage and culture’ with a very broad and somewhat elastic understanding. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it does not approach the question with the sharp insights and vocabulary of the professional or specialist. Nevertheless consumer research over the years indicates that tourists to Ireland are little older, more affluent and well educated. They are open-minded and anxious to learn about the place they are visiting, and they want an authentic and immersive experience through which they can engage with heritage rather than encounter a ‘product’ which has been produced elsewhere and delivered for consumption at yet another place again.

It seems clear then that Irish tourism needs a vibrant and accessible heritage and culture sector. While Irish heritage itself may look elsewhere to identify its core purpose and raison d’être, it should be acknowledged that the sector’s capacity to generate economic activity and sustain employment through tourism could represent a complementary form of validation. In other words, if we are destined not to learn from history, might we become more adept at earning from history?

IMPLICATIONS FOR HERITAGE – CREATIVITY OF MIND OR DEPTH OF POCKET? Whilst it would be nice to find ourselves in a situation where we have both creative minds and deep pockets at our disposal, this unfortunately is not always the case. During the Celtic Tiger years there seemed to be occasions where money was thrown at issues across all sectors, whether these were issues of economic development, social development or culture/heritage development. In some instances these deep pockets allowed us to conceal complacency and lazy thinking. Perhaps one of the benefits of now having considerably more shallow pockets is that we – in all sectors of the Irish economy – are thrown back to rely more on our own resourcefulness and creativity of mind. This observation is particularly appropriate to the manner in which the tourism and culture/heritage sectors engage with each other.

As the National Tourism Authority of Ireland, Fáilte Ireland is resourced and positioned to carry out a number of tasks designed to support the tourism industry. These are typical of tourism boards in other countries and usually involve functions such as marketing and promotion, business supports, product development, research and development, and standards and classification. Much of this is on the ‘supply side’, supporting the firms and systems through which

In this mosaic the prize to be secured is a truly distinctive destination which provides a tourism experience that cannot be found elsewhere. This is supported by the tourism board (yellow tiles), but the real impacts on the visitor, and the quality of the experience they encounter, will be determined by a wide range of other agents who are active in that destination (green tiles). The point is that the tourism board cannot engineer a tourism experience into position.

This will be determined every day in real time by real actors who in all likelihood will not consider themselves to be in the tourism business, who will properly pursue their own mission and objectives, but who in doing so will in Figure 1.

Influences on the visitor and the tourism experience

effect deliver the aggregate tourism experience in that destination.

It remains therefore a core task of Fáilte Ireland to develop and maintain partnerships with these various stakeholders through which a mutually beneficial collaboration can be established that will support the provision of an optimised visitor experience.

The OECD text quoted above made reference to ‘tangible and intangible cultural assets’. This issue of ‘intangible cultural assets’ in particular is an area

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where the tourism and culture/heritage sectors could purposefully collaborate.

Unlike the more immediately accessible tangible assets of the built heritage, these intangible cultural assets (literature, legend, mythology, place-names (logainmeacha), story-telling etc) can remain invisible and inaccessible to the visitor unless direct efforts are made to address this challenge. An enduring inaccessibility in this regard would be a particular pity given the richness of these cultural assets, and given that tourism research repeatedly tells us that these are precisely the type of cultural experiences that visitors to Ireland wish to encounter.

There exists therefore a very immediate and a very important agenda for future collaboration between the Irish Museums Association and Fáilte Ireland.

Aidan Pender is Director of Strategic Development at Fáilte Ireland (The National Tourism Development Authority)

NOTES 1.

This article is adapted from a talk presented at the Irish Museums Association Annual Conference, Rising to the challenge on 25 February 2012, Limerick

2.

OECD – The Impact of Culture on Tourism 2009. ISBN 9789264056480

3.

‘The Competitive Advantage of Nations’ Michael Porter Harvard University 1988

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4.

Visitor Attitude Survey 2010: Executive Summary (Fáilte Ireland 2011)

Public spaces for equality and diversity Niall Crowley STARTING POINTS1 The two obvious starting points for this examination of public spaces, in particular museums and galleries, and their role and contribution in society are the current situation in relation to diversity and that in relation to equality in Ireland.

Ireland is not at ease with its diversity of people. We are a diverse society by identity. We can be differentiated as men and women, transgender people, lesbian, gay and bisexual people, older and younger people, people of particular religions and none, people with disability and minority and majority ethnic people for example. We are diverse by situation. We can be differentiated by socio economic status, by family status, and by caring responsibilities for example.

We do not, in any widespread manner, see this diversity as a resource. We don’t see it as something to be valued in our society or as something that challenges us to do things differently. At best we tolerate it. Tolerance is a big value in Irish society. It is however a problematic value. Tolerance is about putting up with something we find distasteful, something that is just not quite right. Tolerance can too easily co-exist with contempt and can serve to make us feel good in spite of this contempt. Most often we just ignore this diversity. We reason with ourselves that it is sufficient to treat everyone the same. However when everyone is not the same and we purport to treat them as if they are the same, we end up excluding some people. It ends up as discrimination.

Unfortunately we discriminate on a significant scale on the basis of diversity.

The special survey on equality of the Central Statistics Office carried out in 2010 found that 12% of people aged eighteen and over felt they had been discriminated against in the previous two years.2 Black and minority ethnic people, nonnationals, unemployed people, non Roman Catholics and people with disability reported the highest rates of discrimination. The most common forms of discrimination were on the grounds of race and age. As a society we can also take steps to make as if we are all the same. We segregate groups through special provision, especially older people and people with disabilities. We try to assimilate groups and demand that they behave in accordance with the dominant norms in society. This is particularly true for black and minority ethnic people (including the Traveller community).

Finally we continually stereotype people who are deemed to be different. We

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attribute fixed and unchanging characteristics to all members of minority groups. This is based on false assumptions, in particular the assumption that all members of the group are the same. Stereotyping is an enabler of discrimination.

Choices are made, consciously or unconsciously, in a diverse society, about whose heritage is held, whose culture is guarded, what is the nature of the learning enabled and to whom the public space is afforded. Choices are made, consciously or unconsciously, in a divided society, about who benefits from these resources, and what ends they serve. Are these resources used to sustain current responses to diversity and equality or to challenge for new and more effective responses? The challenge to museums and galleries is twofold – to value diversity in terms of celebrating and nourishing a range of identities, cultures and norms; and to advance equality in terms of posing a challenge to inequality and of resourcing those who experience inequality. To meet this challenge museums and galleries need a planned and systematic initiative.

The second starting point for this examination is equality. As a society it is clear that the value of equality does not have great popular traction. We are more comfortable with the value of fairness. As a result we are surprisingly at ease with inequality and Ireland is a deeply unequal society. Wealth is highly concentrated, income is unevenly distributed, men get paid more than women, and women are under-represented in the Dáil by way of example. We have one of the harshest asylum regimes in the EU, same sex couples cannot marry, and abuse of older people and domestic violence against women are widespread.

This inequality in our society is an inequality in access to resources such as income, wealth, jobs and public goods including education, housing and health.

It is also an inequality in access to power and influence, to status and standing, and to relationships of respect and solidarity. This inequality is increasing as a direct result of current policies to manage the economic crisis. Income inequality has increased. In 2010, the average income in the highest paid 20% of households was 5.5 times that of those in the lowest paid 20%. In 2009 the gap was 4.3 times. Poverty has increased. The number of people deemed at risk of poverty in 2010 was 15.8% of the population. This figure stood at 14.1% in 2009. The deprivation rate, where people do not have access to two or more items deemed essential, stood at 23% in 2010, up from 17% in 2009.

Irish society faces two inter-linked challenges – to value diversity and to advance equality. Meeting these challenges is, first and foremost, important for those who experience inequality and discrimination. However they are also important for organisations, as we know that organisations that invest in equality and diversity systems perform better. They are also important for the whole of society, as we know that more equal societies benefit almost everyone. There is less violence, drug abuse, obesity and imprisonment in more equal societies. There is greater trust, level of educational attainment, life expectancy, social mobility and innovation.

MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES Museums and galleries are an important resource for society. They are holders of our heritage, guardians of our cultures, sources of learning and providers of public space.

This initiative would firstly be to enable access for the diversity of groups and individuals who experience inequality and poverty. It would then be to secure a sense of ownership of the public space they provide by these groups and individuals. Finally it would be to contribute to social change, change that makes for a society that has no place for discrimination or poverty, that values diversity and has regard to its practical implications, and that achieves full equality in practice for all groups and people.

ACCESS Enabling access appears to be the dominant, and often sole, response of museums and galleries to the challenge of diversity and equality. At worst this is limited to getting people into the institution with no assessment of who these people might be and no definition of who is sought as key audiences. At best it is about identifying particular groups who do experience inequality and exclusion as key audiences. It is about establishing the barriers they face in achieving access to the institution and working with them to dismantle these barriers. There are barriers of communication where information is targeted at, and tailored to, those who hold resources in society or who form part of dominant norms. This involves language, media and imagery that do not engage groups and individuals who experience inequality and poverty. These barriers also include perceptions held of the institution by those who are excluded and a filtering of all communication through negative perceptions.

There are barriers in staff attitudes. Staff are drawn from a wider population that holds stereotypes and false assumptions about groups that are deemed to be different or that experience inequality and poverty. Inevitably these stereotypes and false assumptions can take some hold within institutions. There are barriers in the physical environment of institutions. These include inaccessibility for people

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with disabilities. They also include an unwelcoming physical environment that fails to reflect diversity of the population in its decoration, fit out or style.

affirmed. Finally a sense of ownership can be developed through employment policies that recruit from within these groups that experience inequality and poverty, and procurement policies that purchase from within these groups.

Museums and galleries need to be part of the resilience of local communities and their economy and in particular of those parts of the local community that experiences inequality and poverty.

Access can only be achieved on foot of consultation with groups experiencing inequality and poverty. This consultation can be engaged in with individuals who are members of these groups and with organisations that represent these groups. The organisations are particularly important as they provide the space within which individual concerns and ideas are shared and built into shared perspectives and collective interests. Access also requires some knowledge of the communities that the institution seeks to serve. Institutions need to engage in some profiling of these communities to understand their diversity, the manner in which this diversity is organized and seeks a voice, and the situation and experience of specific groups within this diversity.

Access is a vital starting point. However, it does not necessarily mean any valuing of diversity. It does not necessarily reflect any advancing of equality for this diversity. Access, as the sole response to diversity and inequality, can end up as quite a patronising exercise. It can be about educating the dispossessed or doing good works. There is a need for institutions to go further.

SENSE OF OWNERSHIP Museums and galleries that seek to secure a sense of ownership with the diversity of groups that experience inequality and poverty need to build a particular relationship with these groups, their members and the organisations that represent them. This relationship is most usefully based on two key practice developments. The first development is to move from consultation to include for participation. Institutions need to go beyond listening to the views of these groups to according real influence to them in terms of what is done in the institution and how it operates. Planning needs to involve organisations that represent these groups. Decision making systems and structures need to be opened up to include their voice and perspectives.

The second development is to move from securing a presence of people who are members of these groups within the institution to include an outreach from the institution into these communities. In this way the institution is present within communities that experience poverty and inequality with its collections, personnel and activities. Alongside this new relationship a sense of ownership is further established where activities and programmes reflect diversity and hold relevance for different identities, different experiences and different situations.

Different heritages are collected; and different cultures, norms and traditions are

SOCIAL CHANGE Museums and galleries in occupying valuable public spaces are actors in our society that cannot afford to remain neutral or on the sidelines when it comes to inequality and diversity. They will either reinforce the status quo of inequality and discrimination or they will challenge it. Museums and galleries can be, and need to be, agents for social change, champions for a better society. To play this role museums and galleries need to expand their purpose in a manner that goes beyond the collection and matters pertaining to the collection. Museums and galleries could usefully define their purpose in terms of empowering people and groups that experience inequality. This can be based on an established partnership with their representative organisations. It can involve offering a source and a type of learning that empowers, by affirming these groups and enabling them to be authors of their own histories and futures. It can include services that enhance the quality of life of these communities intellectually, socially and economically. Finally it can involve providing a public space where these groups are present as actors, decision makers and users.

They could usefully define their purpose in terms of solidarity. They could be a voice for equality and diversity. Museums and galleries are part of a wider framework of institutions involved in local governance. They can lead for equality and diversity within this framework by the standards they set and operate. They can bring forward issues of equality and diversity in the various forums to which they have access due to their standing within this framework of local governance.

Finally, they could usefully define their purpose in terms of resourcing social change through their programme of activities. These activities could be designed to facilitate an analysis of situations of inequality, make links with other actors engaged in pursuing social change, and stimulate thinking about alternatives to our current situation. Museums and galleries could be a key stimulus for the imagination we need to invent a different future.

CONCLUSION

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Challenges to secure access, to build a sense of ownership and to contribute to social change require an evolution in the culture, structure and functions of museums and galleries. Such evolution does not happen by chance. It cannot just be left to individual champions. It requires sustained effort and needs a planned and systematic approach by the institution itself and its leadership. A planned and systematic approach to this evolution can best be based on institutions having an equality policy. Such a policy sets out the standards for equality the institutions want to achieve and how they will hold their staff and Board to account for these standards. This type of approach needs institutions to provide equality and diversity training for their staff. This would offer staff access to the knowledge, values, and skills needed to put the equality policy into practice. It needs an equality plan that sets objectives for institutions and identifies the steps that they will take to enhance their contribution to equality and diversity.

Leadership within institutions is key in achieving a planned and systematic approach to this evolution. Museums and galleries need to have high level, high profile and well-informed leadership for equality and diversity to ensure their commitment to equality and diversity is given full expression. This leadership will ensure all plans, budgets, and key decisions are assessed for their impact on groups and people who experience inequality and poverty.

This is a time of serious resource constraints. However the ideas and suggestions set out above are not about new resources, they are about how the existing resources of museums and galleries are used and who benefits from the manner in which they are currently used. This is what has to evolve if museums and galleries are to fully engage with the challenge of valuing diversity and advancing equality.

Niall Crowley is an independent equality and diversity expert. He was chief executive of the Equality Authority for ten years from its establishment in 1999 NOTES 1. This paper is based on a presentation at the IMA Annual Conference in Limerick in 2012.

2. Central Statistics Office, 2011. Quarterly National Household Survey – Equality, Quarter 4 2010.

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