Standing on shaky ground?

Ireland's national cultural institutions are hamstrung by antiquated forms of governance, writes Arminta Wallace

A national cultural institution. The very words have a comforting ring, redolent somehow of big stone buildings and unbroken traditions, a sort of guaranteed-Irish stamp of cultural confidence. Scratch that unruffled surface, however, and you find a rather different scenario in which the keyword seems to be confusion.

To begin with, the presence of "national" in the name of an organisation is an unreliable indicator of the organisation's official status. As is its absence. The National Concert Hall and the National Archives of Ireland sit at very different ends of a sliding scale of state involvement and control. The NCH is a semi-state organisation with its own board of directors; the archives' responsibility for official papers marries it intimately, for better or for worse, to the relevant government departments.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art, despite its trendy title, is a national cultural institution whose situation is roughly comparable to that of the NCH. So is the Chester Beatty Library, despite the distinctly international look of its multicultural collections and the fact that it is technically a charitable institution set up under the terms of the will of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty.

But the most extraordinary anomaly of all is built into the fabric of the two organisations at the heart of the idea of national cultural institutions: the National Museum of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland. It will come as a surprise to anyone who has feasted their eyes on the stunning array of gold jewellery that lights up the foyer of the Museum of Archaeology & History, on Kildare Street, taken kids to the Saturday Club activities at the Museum of Country Life, near Castlebar in Co Mayo, or consulted the catalogues on the library's superb website that the day-to-day running of these vital centres of cultural heritage is still dictated by the Dublin Science and Art Museum Act of 1877.

Designed to ensure that the collections of the Royal Dublin Society, formed in 1731, would be safely handed over to the then department of science and art "for the benefit of the public and of the society", this venerable piece of legislation is hardly cutting-edge stuff at a time when museums and libraries have made radical changes in the way they interact with the public.

Isn't it time, then, that we had some new legislation to get this situation sorted? The answer is that we do. It's called the National Cultural Institutions Act, 1997. The problem is that seven years after its appearance on the statute book it still hasn't been implemented. Which begs a series of further questions, chiefly "why?" and "when?" The Act was the brainchild of the then minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht, Michael D. Higgins, after extensive consultation with people in the sector. Before it could be implemented a new government took office, complete with a new minister, Síle de Valera, whose portfolio was expanded to include the islands. Cynics suggested that as the titles of arts ministers grew longer and longer, so did the chances of the Act ever being implemented. But when the snappily named Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, John O'Donoghue, took over he was said to be keen to get the new legislation up and running. Just before Christmas 2002 staff at the National Library were told to prepare themselves for imminent implementation. Nothing happened. January 1st, 2003, turned into January 1st, 2004 - and still nothing happened. The latest date to do the rounds is April 1st - cynics, take note - although the department has refused to confirm or deny this.

Were it to be implemented, though, what would the Act do? "To the man in the street the Act is irrelevant," says Pat Donlon, who was director of the National Library from 1989 to 1997. "But if you look at arts organisations throughout the country, governance is always a huge issue, a huge, huge issue. It may seem to be just a lot of legalese and bureaucracy, but it's terribly important. If you get the governance right the rest will flow. The implementation of this Act would be a very important step."

Essentially, it would transform museum and library staff from civil servants to public servants. Boards of directors would be appointed for both organisations, which would be accountable to the Government for their own finances. At present the secretary of the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism is the one that reports to, say, the Public Accounts Committee on matters of funding. "It would be more in keeping with the way in which businesses are run," says Donlon.

She adds that the delay in activating the Act may have given the institutions involved a welcome breathing space. "I actually think it wasn't a bad thing that it wasn't enacted overnight. For aeons the national institutions were the Cinderellas of the cultural scene; over the past decade an awful lot has been done to raise their status. When I was in the library the roof used to leak - we had to put buckets out to catch the drips on a rainy day - and everybody remembers when the National Gallery had to close because there was water pouring in. It was appalling. In a relatively short time those institutions have made huge strides, so in a way the delay has been quite useful. But now I think the time has come for it to happen."

Of all the institutions mentioned, the National Library has probably made the biggest strides in recent years. Funding increases have permitted not just steady improvement in staffing levels and a major renovation of the beautiful main reading room but also an ambitious programme of building work that includes plans for a state-of-the-art storage facility and, on the ground floor of the former National College of Art and Design building, which stands between the library and Leinster House, a new exhibition space that will open with a James Joyce exhibition for the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, in June.

"It's a very exciting project for us," says the library's acting director, Aongus Ó hAonghusa. "When we bought the Joyce collection it really put us on the map in terms of James Joyce scholarship, but we had to ask ourselves, What will we do with this? What can we do with it? We have some fantastic collections here that are just hidden away. OK, researchers can come in and use them, but in terms of putting our treasures on display this is a major advance. Not only will we have this space on an ongoing basis but we'll have a seminar and lecture space as well."

At the National Museum its director, Pat Wallace, is equally upbeat. "We've had a revolution here. We've doubled our staff; we've doubled the number of sites, from two to four; we have a state-of-the-art laboratory at our headquarters, at Collins Barracks, and we're about to begin a new phase of building work up there on a new building for the South Sea Islands collection. Here in Kildare Street the renovation of the outside of the building is complete and the new porch will be ready by the summer.

"The Museum of Country Life, at Castlebar, is breaking records as regards visitor numbers - which Collins Barracks, to be honest, isn't. The Luas business over the past year or so hasn't helped, but we've got to get some big, big items in there to make it more attractive. We also have plans for a corporate space which would be a major addition to the social scene in Dublin."

Other national institutions would report similar successes - the Chester Beatty Library's glorious premises in Dublin Castle, say, or the National Gallery's airy Millennium Wing. But the rising tide of prosperity hasn't lifted all boats. At the National Archives, on Bishop Street, things are approaching crisis point, according to Catriona Crowe, the senior archivist in charge of special projects. The recent release of Counties In Time, a superb CD-ROM offering an overview of the range and wealth of material available in the archives, suggests the organisation is ahead of the game when it comes to user-friendliness and ease of access. Behind the scenes, however, there is a very different story to be told.

"Everybody whinges about funding, but we have more reason to whinge than most," says Crowe. "Compared to the sort of investment that has been put into our fellow cultural institutions we've had very little. We have got an increase in staff, which has helped, but we're still very understaffed compared with other archives internationally - we have 45, compared to 180 at the National Archives of Scotland - and we badly need a new building. A public-private partnership is being explored to build one on the site we now occupy in Bishop Street, but it has been dragging on for years and it's getting ridiculous. We're actually full now. We can't take in records that we should be taking in, and it's a major stumbling block to development here. So we have a lot of wonderful stuff which can't be produced to the public because it can't be listed and can't be conserved."

There are no plans to allow the archives the sort of administrative independence that the implementation of the National Cultural Institutions Act would bring. But it's not the only organisation to have been afflicted by a sort of ongoing paralysis. For all its recent dynamism, the library, too, has suffered. It's what might be called the curious case of the National Library job. The directorship is an influential post that ought to attract hordes of applicants - as the library's annual report for 2002 points out, the director represents the library on the Conference of Irish National and University Libraries and is a trustee of the Chester Beatty Library, a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Irish Manuscripts Commission and the Council of National Cultural Institutions and a director of the National Preservation Office in London. Yet repeated attempts to fill it by recruitment competition have failed. The salary of something between €74,389 and €96,672 is said to deter high-flyers.

When Pat Donlon retired, in 1997, Brendan O'Donoghue was drafted in, almost by default, from the Civil Service. He turned out to be an able administrator and a tireless campaigner for the library's cause - and he is generally credited with turning the library's fortunes around and getting its building programme under way. When he retired, last September, Ó hAonghusa, who had come to the library from the Civil Service three years earlier, was asked to take over as acting director.

It has, he says, been a challenging five months. It must also have been frustrating, not knowing whether he'll be appointed permanently, not knowing whether, if he is appointed, he'll be presiding over an old-style Civil Service library or the new, more independent model.

So far as the Act is concerned, Ó hAonghusa says he's very much in favour of it. "In the long term I think it would definitely be a positive move for the library. Life won't change for most of the staff here. Their work will be the same, it will just be a question of who pays their salary. Clearly, moving from the Civil Service to the public service is a source of concern for people, but it has happened already in many organisations - and in any case, the Act stipulates that there won't be any diminution in their status. The existing structure has served the library very well over the years, but we have no scope to formulate, say, a library training policy or a library human-resources policy. In that sense we'd have more control over our own destiny."

But he warns of a significant hurdle to be crossed around the issue of staffing. "We don't even have our own bank account. At present the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism provides most of the library's banking and finance functions and most of the personnel and human-resource functions. If we move to independent status we'll need extra - and expert - staff to do that."

The National Museum, meanwhile, has a curious case of its own. It has not one but two boards: a board of visitors, which is a relic of the 1877 Act, and a caretaker board, set up in expectation of the "imminent" arrival of the 1997 Act. Implementation of the Act would regularise this situation, but Pat Wallace questions whether the type of board envisaged by the Act would be better for the museum. "The mere idea of a board doesn't confirm freedom. If you had a board doing its job in the way that the caretakers of the British Museum do theirs we could do an awful lot more. A board which would prioritise the policy and developmental needs of the museum; a board with a nationally respected chairperson which would attract more investment by impressing on government the need to develop the museum by realising the visions of the director and staff."

He believes that under the new Act the board is designed to be a kind of über- director: more of a restriction than a liberation. "The wording is very strange. For instance, if you read the Act there's a threat under the National Monuments Act that the role of the museum in its consultative capacity vis-à-vis artefacts from excavations, et cetera, would be taken away. Now does that sound like more freedom? It isn't. It's the end of the freedom."

In the coming weeks, it is said, the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism will be involved in detailed discussions with the Department of Finance about the implications of the Act. Money will be at the centre of those discussions, and April 1st may see many of the questions answered. Cynicism aside, however, the future of our national treasures is a question that should, if it is asked properly, go way, way beyond price.