Curios emerge from behind closed doors

This summer the National Museum at Collins Barracks is putting on week-long displays of items kept in storage the rest of the year. RositaBoland peeps into the coffers and asks why can't we view thingssuch as Michael Collins's hurley all year?

The visiting public to Collins Barracks will know that only two of its four wings contain exhibitions on view. What they may not know is that the other two, equally extensive wings, contain a staggering 70,000 items which are in storage. Among these are some 2,000 pieces of silver, and 500 musical instruments. Not included in these figures are the tiny items such as stamps and coins.

During the summer months, the museum is taking one significant piece out of storage each week and placing it on view for one week only. Thus, this summer, the public will have the opportunity to see: Michael Collins's hurley, the 17th-century Fitzgerald Kildare Harp, a bassoon reputed to have been played at the first performance of Handel's Messiah and the 1903 GAA All-Ireland Football Trophy. At the end of the assigned week, these items will all be returned to storage.

So why are these pieces not on display all the time? Why were they chosen out of all the thousands of others? And why are so many pieces in permanent storage? Michael Kenny, Keeper of the Art and Industry Collections, and Sandra McElroy, Curator of Musical Instruments, try to explain.

"No museum can display everything," Kenny points out. The museum's policy is a long-term one. "We're not just collecting for today, either. We're collecting for tomorrow's generation. And although we can't display everything, we have it all available for people doing research."

In the past the museum was indiscriminate in its acceptance of donations and in its own acquisitions. Nowadays, it is very selective about accepting donations, and the majority of its acquisitions budget is given over to Irish objects.

We're upstairs in one of the storage wings. Rows of tall grey lockers, of the kind you see for holding stationery in offices, line the rooms. Downstairs, on the way in, we walked past some old mill-stones. Up here, there are scores of small Indian figures lined up in rows on the floor, waiting to be entered in inventory sheets. Sitting on one of the room's deep windowseats is an old cash register and a box with the model of a palaquin in it. On another windowseat is a box that once contained Burtons Chocolate Chip Cookies and which now, according to the labelling on it, holds items intriguingly described as "Tools and Skin".

Kenny starts opening the cupboards, and it's like looking into a modern version of Aladdin's Cave. There is one cupboard full of silver chalices and communion cups. Another is full of trays and salvers. More and more doors are opened. Candle snuffers, snuff boxes, spoons, buckles, paper knives, cups, decanter labels - all silver - are set out in row upon shining row. There is one solid silver salver the size of a cartwheel, which occupies half a cupboard. "The people who lived well in Ireland in the past really lived well," Kenny notes.

Several of the cups are engraved; they were originally presented as agricultural prizes. Kenny points out a few that were awarded for tillage in the 1840s. "There are lots of dimensions to these pieces apart from the purely aesthetic one. These cups are also a type of social document: illustrating how some people in Ireland were getting prizes for tillage at a time when most of the people were dying of Famine. The two halves of the one world."

A cupboard in the next row contains scores of tiny, exquisite enamelled boxes, decorated with flowers and birds. "Patch boxes," McElroy explains. The 18th-century English boxes would have contained beauty spots for women. "They used mouse skin as eyebrows," she adds. This must have been a more discreet practice, as there are no boxes labelled as being the official containers for mousepelts.

There is something extraordinarily seductive about seeing beautiful, precious things laid out at random, and with no glass between you and them. I ask permission to handle a silver-handled sword, with a Dublin stamp of 1748, and brandish it in the corridor between the cupboards. It's a glorious, heady feeling, this fusion with the past.

'THE blade probably isn't silver," Kenny observes pragmatically. "A weapon would need to be of stronger metal; silver is too soft." Too soft for a lethal strike is what he means.

McElroy opens cupboards containing musical instruments. There are uillean pipes by the famous maker Maloney, fiddles by Perry and a harp by John Egan painted black and decorated with gold shamrocks. In the cupboard with the Egan harp, there is a large brown envelope with "Old Harp Strings" marked in red. "A lot of people think it's shame that we don't play the instruments," she says. "But stringing a harp, for instance, puts terrible pressure on the wood. We're not attempting to turn the pieces back into playing instruments."

The Fitzgerald Kildare harp was only on display for one week this summer because Collins Barracks still does not have its musical instruments room set up. The museum policy these days is to exhibit things thematically, rather than in the old-fashioned cabinet-of-curiosities method. Hence Michael Collins's hurley, which would be of interest to many, will not go on permanent display until a formal Irish history exhibit is established, to "contextualise" the significance of the hurley.

"And the pen that signed the Treaty," adds Kenny,

"And the table it was signed on," says McElroy, waving an arm that encompases the North and East wings, and the 70,000 itmes stored therein.

The weekly out-of-storage exhibits are part of the museum's extensive summer outdoors programme, supported by the EBS, and running until August 25th at the National Museum of Decorative Arts & History, Collins Barracks, Dublin 7. All events are free. Call 1800-805505 for a free events brochure or pick one up at any EBS office.