It's the culture crunch!

Recession or not, children want to be entertained and a budget of €50 for a family Sunday in Dublin doesn't seem generous. But EOIN CUNNINGHAMfinds it more than enough as he rediscovers the joys of the capital's cultural offerings

WHEN YOU ARE sitting in the middle of the floor of an art gallery drawing pictures with a four-year-old, it is remarkable how far the recession is from your mind. These are chastening times to be interested in culture. With the economy continuing to slide, ever more redundancies and rising taxes, the last thing on many people’s minds is the state of the arts. Going to the theatre or the cinema is expensive. Some live music and comedy shows now costs more than some flights to Europe, and not just the ones sold by Michael O’Leary.

By the time we pay the mortgage and all the bills, there isn’t a whole lot of money left in the pot for catching the Boss in the RDS or Pinter at the Gate. For all those already caught in the net of unemployment, the benefit base rate of €204.30 per week was not conceived with Ticketmaster in mind.

But being short of money doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the wonderful cultural amenities around us. After all, the Bible tells us that “man shall not live by bread alone”. So I decided to see how I got by on a budget of €50 for a day of culture with my wife Nadine and two sons, Tadhg (aged eight) and Sol (four).

12 noon

We plan to start the day in Collins Barracks. But it’s Sunday and it turns out that the opening hours are between 2pm and 5pm, as opposed to 10am and 5pm during the rest of the week.

So we decide our cultural sustenance should start with a visit to one of the many Asian restaurants along Parnell Street. Mindful of the dictum to "eat where the locals do", we opt for China House, where cultural highlights include a waving animatronic cat and a flat-screen TV showing what looks to be the Chinese equivalent of The Krypton Factor.

Lunch for two adults and two children comes to €31, making us very happy as we race to the next stop on our adventure, the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma).

1.15pm

Exploreris a programme run by Imma for families, where both parents and children work together to create art inspired by ideas and themes in selected works from the museum's collection – in this case, Kathy Prendergast's City Drawingsand the work of outsider artist Madge Gill.

Catherine and Stephen, today’s facilitators, give us a quick explanation of the process, then hand over some pencils and sheets with the outline of various countries and leave us to it.

Half an hour in, it becomes apparent that this may be the most fun I’ve ever had in an art gallery, which may say something about the quality of openings I’ve attended in the past. Nor have I ever seen children so absorbed in any kind of art. It strikes me that Imma could charge a lot of money for this kind of experience. Mindful of our budget, I keep my thoughts to myself.

We leave Imma reluctantly – and €10 poorer owing to our inability to resist coffee and hot chocolate on the way out. Next stop: Collins Barracks.

2.30pm

I'm not certain that Collins Barracks can top the sheer indulgence of lying on cushions and drawing. I fear that there will be nothing to compare. Of course, this is before we discover an exhibition called Soldiers and Chiefs: The Irish at War at Home and Abroad from 1550, which is as addictive as crack cocaine for boys under 10 (and girls, come to that, based on a very unscientific survey taken by this reporter).

Visiting exhibitions with children is, in most people’s experience of museum visits, as the 100-yard dash is to a stroll on the beach. We can normally get through even the largest museums faster than Usain Bolt, but it’s a testament to the quality of this exhibition that one of the staff has to gently remind us that the museum is in fact closed and would we mind leaving so that they can lock up.

Multimedia presentations – where actors done up as drill sergeants exhort our children to exhibit a more military bearing – are so successful that I am given to reconsider my civilian parenting style.

5pm

As we are still under the magic €50 limit, we decide to try one more cultural activity before calling it a day. The Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin has only been open for a short time, but it has already created some of the most interesting and imaginative exhibitions you could hope to see anywhere.

We all went to its previous show, Lightwave, an interactive collection of exhibits that explored light in all its forms. It was an experience which comprehensively catered for the desire of both children and adults to press buttons and look at shiny things.

The current exhibition is called Infectiousand, unsurprisingly, it focuses on how infections spread. On arrival, you are provided with a radio-frequency identification tag, which tracks you as you wander the gallery. This tag periodically becomes "infected", at which point you must go to a healing station to restore yourself.

It turns out that your reporter has one of the few tags that are perpetually infected and resist all methods of healing. This is greeted in the traditional fashion by the rest of the family, who promptly disown me, scooting off to look at computer simulations of pandemics and artistic expressions of the infectiousness of ideas, while I drag my diseased carcass several safe paces behind.

This exhibition is not directly aimed at younger children – it's recommended for ages 15 and older – but while it may not have Lightwave's obvious bells and whistles, it's just as fascinating and, given the events of recent weeks, much more topical.

AT THE END of our day, we do a quick tot-up. Sunday parking was free, as were all the exhibitions and activities. The only thing we spent money on was an affordable lunch and a somewhat less economical cafe stop, totalling €41. In return, we had a day full of activities, which managed to keep the interest of four people with wildly differing levels of concentration – and in each case, we wanted to do it all over again.

Set against that, and especially in the current economic climate, it’s difficult to see the attraction of overpriced popcorn and the latest animated animal-caper movie. Whether you have kids or not, the reality is that culture, the affordable, exciting and mind-expanding kind, is very much out there and waiting for you.

Catch Up On Culture Week

Catch Up On Culture Week, organised by the Irish Museums Association (irishmuseums.org) to attract new visitors, takes place next week, from May 17th to 24th.

During the week, museums, folk parks, historic houses, galleries and arts centres all over Ireland will host a wide variety of displays and events.

Contact your local museums, heritage and cultural sites for details.