A mess of dull, Gaelic potage

YOU'VE heard the row, now see the show. Although no one can be accused of making such a crass pitch for business, the Museum of the City of New York has certainly benefited from an old axiom in action there's no such thing as bad publicity.

The museum's exhibition Gaelic Gotham A History of the Irish in New York, has resulted in weekday attendances tripling to more than 200 people a day. Not bad for a place slightly off the beaten track at Fifth Avenue and East 103rd Street and a "suggested" admission charge of $5.

All this after a controversy about the curating of the show spilled into the media, including The Irish Times, and even into the leader column of the New York Times which struck its traditional lordly tone on things Hibernian under the headline "Fighting Irish".

After the dismissal last year of guest curator Marion Casey, vigorous complaints from many in the Irish community here and a spirited defence by museum director Robert MacDonald, visitors may expect to find bloodstains on the carpets. In this, as in any other hopes they might hold about Gaelic Gotham, they are going to be disappointed.

This is a timid, unimaginative, dull exhibition, thoroughly unworthy of its subject. Sadly, after Casey worked on her ideas for years, there are too many signs of hasty preparation of this replacement. Ironically some of the present day material quotes Irish Americans demanding more respect from the folks back in Ireland a mess like this is hardly going to generate anything of the kind.

For example, those 1990s quotes come in a video showing continuously in one corner the best thing in the show. Only waiting around for the credits to roll revealed that this was an episode from Stateside, made for RTE (with WNYC-TV) last year, rather than an original production for Gaelic Gotham. (The exhibition's own oral history slide show, Irish Voices, was virtually unwatchable.)

The new curators' efforts to avoid the old stand bys of Irish American history have resulted in extraordinary prioritising. For example, the Famine (in spite of the 150th anniversary) the coffin ships and the 1863 draft riots crucial elements in the community's history all disappear into a few questionable and densely worded labels. Labour movement politics are crammed into a small case.

On the other hand, the theatre the Democratic Party and the Catholic church get much more space. However, that space is taken up with tedious, under interpreted, institutional detail and mementos placed with a handful of, decent quotes rather than any creative attempt to explain and explore what all these things meant in the lives of ordinary people.

DOMESTIC life is virtually invisible and, despite some high falutin' social history lingo, Gaelic Gotham takes an essentially passive view of the people it portrays, as of its audience apart from the fortuitous video, it never breaks' from a numbing read the label peer into the case model of how a museum exhibition should work. And that's despite $300,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Such coherence as there is narrates the too familiar drama of assimilation versus identity. Some of the "facts" trotted out to support the narrative are dubious.

The bookshop's collection of recent historiography is the best reason to visit the museum I'm stuck into Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White, thanks to my visit there.

Those visitors whose thoughts were recorded in the comment books seemed to be mainly "ordinary" Irish Americans, reasonably pleased to see any version of how far they've come. Happily, and in defiance of the racist stereotype of her community, one 58 year old woman was sufficiently moved by this to remark "Good luck to all the new immigrants in NYC."