Sir, - When the Ancient Egypt exhibition opened at the National Museum, Eileen Battersby wrote an article that praised it very highly. After visiting the exhibition myself, I would disagree with nothing that she wrote, but I would like to offer a number of observations.
Though a plan of the building is available at a desk to one side of the entrance area, there is no visitor friendly signposting system (arrows or colour coding). If the number of lost looking visitors I noticed during my two visits was typical, it would seem that the National Museum is failing in a key area for any such public institution: seeing itself from the point of view of the visitor. (Pressure of space may explain why the designers, who did a good job under the circumstances, used a very small print size in some of the explanatory material and had to place some of it well beyond a child's eye level.)
A wall panel tells us that, as a result of invasion, medieval power structures "were destroyed by the French, who left with new knowledge of, and thirst for, the Pharaonic past." Shouldn't the connection between knowledge and power be of particular concern to an institution like the National Museum? The point is hinted at, though not explored, in an Irish context on the same panel: there is a reference to Irish travellers such as Lady Harriet Kavanagh "returning with collections of antiquities", some of which are in the National Museum today.
As when its Oceania collection was shown a few years ago, the museum characteristically has failed to explore Ireland's ambiguous position in the last century - participating in the Empire as part" of the United Kingdom (jobs for the boys in trade, in administration and in the army), while forming a threat to the same empire in its demand for Home Rule, or independence.
The National Museum does not encourage visitors to offer opinions or suggestions. With millions of pounds of public money being spent on its relocation to the Collins Barracks site, shouldn't there be (a) a process of consultation, not only with teachers but with, the many public and private organisations in the country with roots in the past, and (b) some: pubic debate about the role of the National Museum in the next century?
There is a tension between the settled ways of our archaeologists and curators (who favour nicely segregated and labelled collections' of objects) and the interests of the museum going public. These in my opinion, would be best served by making creative, and sometimes unsettling, connections between those objects and questions of class, power, work, leisure, religion, diet, sexuality and so on.
If things go on as they are, aren't we in danger of finding ourselves the proud possessors of a shiny new 19th century museum for the 21st century? - Yours, etc.,
Castlewood Park,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.