A quiet revolution has been taking place in attitudes and policy towards local heritage in the towns and villages of the southeast. In the past decade, new sources of substantial funding, from central Government and from various EU programmes, have enabled local authorities to reinforce initiatives for the collection, preservation and display of heritage material.
There are active heritage committees and heritage centres in many towns and villages, and the network is spreading. Leading the way in demonstrating professional standards and an imaginative approach to the collection of heritage is Tipperary SR County Museum in Clonmel.
This is a council-funded, professionally staffed institution, one of only eight county museums in the country.
It has swept away the image of a museum as a fusty repository of artefacts from ancient times, and is showing how a regional museum should reflect recent local history and even intervene to record and preserve important examples of contemporary change and development in the community.
This gives the museum a strong relevance to the experience and living memory of the present generation, and fashions a direct link with the past.
Under its present energetic young curator, Pat Holland, the collection of the Clonmel museum has expanded from 900 objects to about 20,000. Visitors are surprised and fascinated to find, for example, a mainframe computer, one of the last models manufactured by the local Digital factory before it closed.
Nearby stands the old plug-in telephone switchboard from the local psychiatric hospital. It was rescued for posterity when it was replaced by a modern electronic switchboard.
Another example of shrewd contemporary intervention is displayed in a glass case: the saxophone used by the Co Tipperary band leader Mick Delahunty, who died in 1992 after 60 years in the music business.
The museum has over 600 postcards of views of the county. It has an important collection of hundreds of photographs of local people, the files of a local photography shop in the early part of the century, unearthed more recently from storage in a shed.
A significant acquisition was the medal collection of Tom Kiely, of Ballyneale, who won the AllRound Athletics Championship of the World (decathlon) at the 1904 Olympics in St Louis. A multimedia presentation about his life is now being prepared as a pilot project.
For its political archives, the museum has carefully collected all the party and individual candidate posters from recent election campaigns. "We could do a whole gallery on politics," Mr Holland remarks.
There are displays of local material relating to the War of Independence and the Civil War, and a comprehensive array of GAA medals from various periods and parishes.
The museum recently hosted an exhibition featuring the Michael Collins letters, which brought in more than 3,000 visitors in eight weeks.
The involvement of local people in offering ideas and suggestions, identifying and supplying material, is a high priority with the museum. But its collections have a wide appeal outside the county, confirming Pat Holland's aspiration: "We want to be local without being parochial."
The museum was set up in the 1940s; it was closed for a time in the 1960s, and opened again in the 1980s with a part-time curator. It is housed in the former public library building in Parnell Street.
Now it is facing the most exciting development in its half-century of existence: construction work is expected to start this autumn on a modern, purposebuilt museum which will have some 10,000 square feet of exhibition and storage space, a laboratory, storerooms, offices and an education room. EU structural funds, the Department of Arts and the Gaeltacht, and the county council are combining in funding the project.
The museum is particularly proud of its small but significant art collection, which features the work of both contemporary and early Irish artists, including John Butler Yeats and William Leech.
A selection of the works is at present on display in the museum under the title Hidden Treasures. It illustrates some of the important trends in Irish art during the last century or so.
The show raises interesting questions about the origin of some of the works and the careers of their painters, as the records are often sketchy.
In particular, there is a fine painting conveying the harsh realism of urban life; what appears to be a scene in a tenement room of a Georgian house, probably in Dublin. The artist is recorded as Rolli Rowland, about whom nothing else is recorded. The museum would welcome elaboration.