Culture Shock: Our museums and galleries must stay free for all

I first heard the word “priceless” about 50 years ago, at the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street in Dublin. I was looking at one of the big, shiny, gold objects, and I asked my father what it would cost. He said it was priceless. The words confused me: I thought it meant the same as worthless. But he explained that some things have a value that has nothing to do with money. This is why I find it depressing to see the National Museum – and, by extension, other public cultural institutions, such as the National Gallery of Ireland and, in Cork, the Crawford Art Gallery – being forced by deliberate Government neglect to consider admission charges.

Those who believe admission charges are the way to resolve what is now an existential crisis for these institutions point, with some justice, to the fact that many countries (including Sweden and France, which would be regarded as progressive on questions of cultural access) make most visitors buy tickets to enter their national collections. But not charging is one of the positive legacies of Victorian paternalism for Ireland. (And God knows we’ve enough negative ones.) The tradition of free entry long predates the State: it is part of the 19th-century Anglo-American culture of self-improvement. Our policy of not charging is notably shared with two of the greatest of the world’s museums: the British Museum and, in Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution. (The Smithsonian is in effect the US national museum; the National Gallery of Art in Washington is also free to enter.) Australia, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (with the Ulster Museum) also have broad policies of free admission. Ireland, in this regard, is part of a positive and progressive anglophone ideal. There are at least three good reasons for sticking with it.

The first has to do with how museums and galleries are used. There is overwhelming evidence that charges put people off visiting. The British experience is instructive, because about half of public museums brought in charges under pressure from the Thatcher government in the 1980s and then abolished them under Tony Blair in 2001. In the 10 years after the abolition of charges, visitor numbers at Britain’s top public museums increased from 7 million to 18 million, a rise of 151 per cent. The reverse is, of course, also true: the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, brought in a £5 entry fee in 1997. Its visitor numbers halved. In the year after charges were lifted again, these numbers shot straight back up.

But this is not just about raw numbers. It’s about equity: younger and poorer people are disproportionately put off by admission charges. And it’s about the way people use a museum or a gallery. If you’re paying to enter, a visit becomes a one-off excursion in which you have to whizz around and take in the highlights. If you’re not, and you live in a city with a public museum or gallery, you can pop in to stare for 10 minutes at one painting or one object. You can go back again and again to explore corners of collections. It’s a qualitatively different experience.

The second big reason not to charge has to do with democracy and the market. It matters greatly that some areas of life are recognised as priceless, which is to say outside the increasingly insistent notion that nothing matters except what can be bought and sold. The objects in our museums are collective possessions. They tell us, as Seamus Heaney put it when he launched the History of Ireland in 100 Objects book at the National Museum last year, that we are a culture and a society before we are an economy. Charging us to see our own possessions is a kind of dispossession. It puts a price on the priceless and diminishes the sense of a collective democratic space beyond the imperatives of the market.

And there’s a third reason that is specific to Ireland. Our cultural institutions are consistently among the top 10 attractions for tourists coming to Ireland. For supporters of charges these tourists look like easy prey: they’re paying for other stuff anyway, so why not for the museums and galleries? But who are these tourists? Very many of them are people of Irish heritage. We bombard them with appeals to value that heritage and identify with Ireland. Are we doing this purely cynically, so we can fleece them, or do we recognise that Irishness is a diaspora culture? If it’s the second option, free entrance to the national collections is an important statement that we recognise that these objects are as much part of their heritage as they are of ours.

I know from my experience of working with the National Museum that the principle of free admission is a huge part of the ethic of the institution, sustaining a commitment to sharing specialist knowledge as a public service. Once you start to commercialise these institutions they inevitably begin to think of their collections as property, to be guarded and monetised, rather than as aspects of a common culture. The way to solve the crisis is to fund these institutions sustainably, not to destroy the ethic that makes them priceless.
fotoole@irishtimes.com