Is it over? Is the fad for interpretative centres now in that happy hunting-ground wherein reside hula hoops, skateboards, Davy Crocket hats, Pakman, the twist and beehive hair? Although this is not like with like: the former are simply examples of the follies of the marketplace, whereas the interpretative centre is the folly of government, as you can tell by the disproportion between capital cost and possible revenue.
The interpretative centre is a classic example of the State spending vast amounts of money on some project because it seems morally worthy to do so. Such addiction to big-project folies de grandeur is common to governments everywhere. The Millennium Dome, for example, should logically have led to a coup d'etat and a generous use of the tumbril and guillotine - though admittedly the odd folly is so splendid that it succeeds. The Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower are merely exceptions which proved the rule.
Public purse
How many interpretative centres are there in Ireland? How much money do they earn? Is the initial capital cost invariably written off as being of no account because it is taken from that easily raided accessory, the public purse? Was that the kind of attitude which permitted the lunacy of the Burren Interpretative Centre to be pursued at such length and with such expenditure down the years?
Though the grounds for opposing the Burren Centre were sound, there were certainly goodish reasons why it could be justified, even if they were outweighed in the balance. I'm not at all sure the same can be said about the interpretative centre for the Ceide Fields outside Ballina, which seems to be a celebration of the fact that man built some stone walls there 5,000 years ago.
Well done ancient man, one might observe, before moving on to some other project. Because all that there is in the Ceide Fields is the stone walls. There are almost no archaeological finds to fill in our knowledge of the time. What we find there are dry-stone walls, and not much else - apart, that is, from a great deal of conjecture.
It is hypothesised in the centre, for example, that the walls enclosed fields which were used for pastoral farming only; but then we are shown a model of a plough whose presence is justified because fragments of a plough-share were found during an archaeological dig. Right. So were the Ceide Fields used for arable farming or not? Apparently no, absolutely not, and yes, absolutely, look at this wooden-handled plough on display here - though to be sure, it's a purely hypothetical reconstruction, because no wood could have survived five millennia immersed in a bog. So we don't know what their ploughs looked like. However, here's one we made later.
Slumbering dummy
Equally hypothetical is a walled wooden bed containing a classical OPW slumbering dummy. We know that timber would since have rotted, so whence this bed? Ah, well, you see, a stone bed of this shape from about this time turned up in Orkney, or somewhere like that, so conjecturally, a wooden bed might well have looked the same - if they used beds, that is, of that shape. But of course we have no idea whether they did or not, because after all, the Ceide Fields are just that: fields, with stone walls and not much else, and certainly no artefacts or dwelling places to tell us anything whatever about the people who made them.
Moreover, the interpretative centre has magicked the stone walls into a single project, undertaken at the one time. But what evidence is there that this is so? Are not field-walls built painfully and slowly, bit by bit, in all societies everywhere? The walls of the Ceide Fields had no military or religious function that we know of, so why should they today be presented as a monumental undertaking to rank with the pyramids or Newgrange?
Thus we have an interpretative centre with very little to interpret: bog, stone walls, fragments of a plough, and not much else. Never fear! There is a rule of interpretative centre thumb, which goes as follows:
when in doubt, call in the OPW mannikins, complete with nice little thatches of black nylon hair and brown hessian jerkins, standing round looking purposefully neolithic.
Now admittedly, no one has the least what sort of garments the people of the time wore - if, that is, they wore clothing at all; but there is presumably a theme-park costumier somewhere busily turning out all these dun-coloured hessian smocks, if only to confirm what unspeakable couturiers Stone Age men and women had to put up with in the bad old days.
Rocket base
In other words, much ado about not much. How much ado? About £2 million worth of centre, slap-bang in the middle of one of the most beautiful spots on the north Mayo coastline, the purpose of which will no doubt baffle archaeologists in 5,000 years' time. Maybe when they reconstruct it in 7000 AD, it will be as a 20thcentury interplanetary rocket base teeming with hessian-dressed, nylon-thatched OPW mannikins.
One final point. Is it really all that wise for the Ceide Fields interpretative centre to have at its core a viewing platform some 50 feet above the ground floor, with a laughably low guard-rail around it containing horizontal bars constructed almost like rungs? A small child could so easily mount that guard rail and with equal ease unlaughably plummet from it. eide Fields interpretative centre? Because no private money with an eye on damage claims would have constructed a viewing platform some 50 feet above floor-level, with a laughably low guard-rail a small child could so easily mount and so unlaughably plummet from.