Mcrseum Management and Curatorship (1990), 9, 85-91

Northern Ireland-The Tenth Area Museums Service?

MALCOLM F. FRY

Plans for introducing an Area Museums Service into Northern Ireland, the only part of the United Kingdom still without one, have been put forward several times. Lately, the Museums and Galleries Commission, the Northern Ireland Department of Education, and a recently formed local group, the Northern Ireland Museums Advisory Committee, have taken up the issue again and tried to provide fresh impetus. This paper reviews the present position, and tries to assess the prospects for success this time.

The Morris Report (1983)

Area Counciis and Area Services are adaptable organisms.’ Both vary in size and scope, the latter from organizations with in-house staff down to little more than contactors’ bureaux. Flexible according to need, therefore, the system is capable in theory at least of adjusting to the requirements of Northern Ireland, where within six fairly thinly populated counties museums are far fewer than in many comparable mainland regions. Accordingly, in 1983, a team reporting on museums here for the second time in under a decade, this time from the Museums and Galleries Commission and led by a future Chairman, Professor Brian Morris, believed that both a scaled-down version of an Area Council and the most basic type of Area Service would fit the bi11.2 Clearly the organization envisaged had none of the quasi-national character pertaining to those Area Councils in Scotland and Wales, both of which have been mentioned from time to time as possible models for something similar in Northern Ireland.

Possibly the Museums and Galleries Commissioners decided that for the foreseeable future the number of clients making use of an Area Service would remain low, and that higher investment together with upgrading could really be justified only much later. At any rate, in line with contemporary thinking within the Commission, professional in-house staff were not to be encouraged, especially for conservation. Work could be done, it was held, by arrangement either with the central institutions or with the private sector. If local expertise failed or resources ran out, it would then instead be sent out of the country, presumably to one of the other Area Services.

As to organizational detail, the Commissioners urged that, both for strength and financial expediency, the Area Service should be depa~mentally linked to the National Museum, which it was proposed to establish by merging the present Ulster Museum and the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. This marked a departure from the normal practice now of enabling Area Services to be autonomous. It may have been influenced by a recommendation contained in the Malcolm Committee’s Report five years earlier that an Area Service here should be operated jointly by the two main museums.’ When

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86 Northern Ireland - The Tenth Area Museums Service?

the merger did not take place, though, the Commissioners, in giving evidence to a Committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly, amended their suggestion to conform with the current trend.

Reaction to the Morris Report

An Area Service, in the form which the Morris Report recommended, made no sense. It merely institutionalized expensively what was already available free, albeit informally, and working well without unduly inconveniencing anybody. On top of that, a weak private sector, together with capacity limitations imposed by personnel shortages in the large museums, made an effective agency system along the lines of Area Museums Services elsewhere highly improbable: something in fact already recognized by Malcolm.4 Sending work abroad was condemned, on all sides, as defeating what should have been the object of setting up an Area Service here in the first place, although of course work is occasionally transferred between some of the existing services according to staff strengths.

Further antagonism rose when the Commissioners seized upon initiatives taken by the existing regional museums in the Province to declare that part of the function of an Area Service could be achieved through regular mutual sharing of resources and people, particularly for conservation. This is fine under ideal circumstances; under frequently straitened ones, though, extra commitments are not taken on lightly, especially open-ended ones for third parties! Unlike the rest of Britain, Northern Ireland has no middle tier of major regional museums with their own highly developed in-house services, and only one archaeological unit with its own laboratory, that could be used on an agency basis by a future Area Council. Then, as now, the only choice is between in-house services provided directly by an Area Council and private-sector arrangements.

Of course, this is not to imply that regional museums in the Province are less than enterprising in their outlook and achievement. By helping themselves they have kept the lid on demand for an Area Service. Over the years all have developed considerable skills in housekeeping and exhibition work: two of the main functions of an Area Service, in fact. Some have invested quite heavily in the wherewithal, relying upon specialist guidance from central institutions to start with, and at intervals thereafter. Each too, in one way or another, has built up what might be called special relationships among themselves or with one of the central bodies for helping to get things done to proper standards.

Naturally the Commissioners’ Report considered a number of matters besides an Area Service. In the end, for a variety of reasons, Government decided to defer action on them all. It did, though, imply acceptance in principle of the desirability of an Area Service. During late 1984 and early 1985 the Education Committee of the Northen Ireland Assembly re-examined the matter in depth, concluding that an Area Service should be a priority, though preferably based on what consumers wanted and would pay for!5

In due course the authorities set up exploratory machinery, part of which comprised the Northern Ireland Museums Advisory Committee (NIMAC). This is a body representing all the principal current professional museum interests in the Province, together with those of the Museums and Galleries Commission. Though it lacks lay

membership, as it were, in the form of local authority representatives, for example, it would appear to be capable of acting as an interim Area Council Executive. Assistance from the Commission and from the Northern Ireland Department of Education enabled NIMAC in 1989 to appoint a full-time official to undertake a number of duties over a

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three-year period connected with the future of small museums in Northern Ireland. Not the least of those duties is that of sounding opinion again, both on the form of any Area Service, and on how best to coordinate local museum developments in order to make good use of resources.

Recent Trends

Prospects for the success of this new initiative are perhaps best gauged by considering some of the post-Morris trends in the Province. It struck the Commissioners in 1983, as it did Malcolm in 1978,6 that nothing exists to stop any really determined group or local authority with the money from opening a museum or heritage exhibition centre. Indeed, legislation enables District Councils to do so if they wish, regardless of whether or not a matching government grant is sought. Creating an Area Council in an attempt at consensual planning and financial guidance, it was conceded, would not by itself change things. Those wanting to go their own way and not accept restraint, for example, simply need not join the Council. Nothing could make them join. Lately, some of these fears

have been realized. Pressure groups of one kind or another hold the initiative in certain types of new

project, sustained by recent growth both in domestic and overseas funds to which they can apply for assistance. The whole Province qualifies, for example, for regional development funding, disbursable through a number of schemes, including culture- related ones. Sometimes application can be made independently of the local public authorities where a source is concerned just with helping Ireland. This has serious implications for any future body that tries, for example, to systematize museum development; although it must be said that under the right circumstances extra cash is always welcome!

At bottom, of course, the new money amounts to little more than ‘pump-priming’- cynics would even say loss-leading-and there are obvious dangers in relying too exclusively upon it to develop a permanent local museum structure. Presenting the heritage in effect assumes a commercial and infrastructural character. Under these conditions it is important at the same time that bodies should have enough in reserve to fend off the impact of cyclical dips. Eventually these hit all sectors of commerce, museums not excepted if they take on that role, despite over-optimistic predictions to the contrary from some quarters.

In Northern Ireland, as elsewhere too, the tendency for display centres sooner or later to become collecting centres is strong. But the long-term care and presentation of collections of whatever kind or size becomes difficult if sufficient to guarantee the future is not forthcoming-worse, if it is not sought-at an early stage. As suspected loss-leaders, heritage centres and the like in particular are poorly placed for attracting extra spending to remedy fundamental deficiencies in conservation, exhibition development or storage. In short, they are improbable contributors towards an Area Service, but likely users nonetheless.

The number of centres in the Province with a broad museum-type function is increasing at the rate of about two a year, and the total as yet, of course, is scarcely excessive by comparison with other parts of the United Kingdom.’ But there are anomalies which underline the drawback of having no coordinating body to check the growth of sectional interests. Some communities, for example, thwarted in their long-standing wish for a proper regional museum, turn instead to raising a number of smaller schemes. Not unexpectedly, the outcome tends to be an assemblage of very

88 Northern Ireland - The Tenth Area Museums Service?

minor museums and exhibition halls lying almost in one another’s shadow, each with separate overheads: hardly the most efficient deployment of resources.

Many in the central institutions, too, are unhappy about some aspects of the present trend. They find themselves continually hampered by financial constraints, while bodies with no acknowledged pivotal role to uphold acquire often substantial sums of money to boost numbers at the fringe. Few doubt, for instance, that if the position stays unchanged some fraction of the 9793 million, which Northern Ireland reportedly is due to receive through Government from EEC Regional Development Funds between 1989 and 1993, will go the same way and push the numbers still higher.

The Way Forward

Proper debate on the way forward is awaited, of course, and the intention here is not to prejudice the outcome. Nevertheless, as things now stand it is hard to imagine a rush to alter habits, and to knuckle down voluntarily under any new system that leaves ambitions unfulfilled. Many have tasted what they consider to be success in the current free-for-all. Others will not easily be put off from trying to achieve the same. Consensus on future policy matters is desirable all the same, and unfamilar ways of getting it may be needed. Measures to block all independent access to funds other than those provided by ratepayers, or secured against the rates, for example, may be the only way to stop piecemeal growth. An Area Service becomes unmanageable if demand is unpredictable, and if clients appear thicker and faster than the system can physically cope with.

Who Pays?

Gauging the cost of an Area Service, of course, lies at the heart of the propsed NIMAC investigation. Customarily, finance to provide services has been routed through the Area Councils, themselves funded more or less on a fifty-fifty basis by government, directly or indirectly, and a consortium of Area Council members. Would similar supply-side arrangements suffice in the present case? It may not be easy to devise an equitable system for local authorities to contribute their share. Some districts currently without facilities would feel that they had no compelling reason to pay, or they might object to subsidizing others. Most would probably prefer to pay only in proportion to what they actually used, although this is not the way that subscriptions to Area Councils are usually formulated! The consequences are serious when Government’s contribution comes on a matching basis.

Of course, for reasons that are well known, long-term support by Government can no longer automatically be assumed. At the moment, for example, increases in central aid to the Area Councils, as indeed to museums generally, fall below the annual inflation rate. Recently the gap has been plugged partly by crisis expedients, although these are not expected to last for as long as they are required. Concern remains such that some Area Councils, faced by mounting demand upon resources, particularly for conservation, are engaging private consultants in order to evaluate even more keenly aspects of the way in which they administer services to clients. ’ All this is not lost on local authorities in Northen Ireland, wary of being gulled into commitments that are initially shared, and which appear to double the resources available for improving the museum service, but whose financial burden they may later find themselves bearing increasingly on their own. Real fears persist of buying a white elephant just to enable the Province to be like the rest of the United Kingdom and have its own Area Service.

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As yet Area Services are not expected to survive just on income earned from providing services to clients, or windfalls from individual or corporate donors, useful adjuncts though these remain, and indeed increasingly so. Because of market limitations,

moreover, Area Services are not really at the same advantage as, say, the non-equity campus companies set up in high-growth sectors of the economy by colleges in order to generate income. Nor are the chances good for tapping the kind of external funding mentioned earlier in connection with small centres and broad economic infrastructural improvement. In a richer country than Northern Ireland one possible alternative might be to try to attract a substantial private endowment that, besides creating an Area Service facility and supporting it long term, at the same time establishes a major public relations asset with which the benefactor is as readily identified as the organization actually using it. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia in Norwich springs to mind as an example of the kind of partnership envisaged. So, too, in a slightly different dimension, does the Getty Conservation Institute in California, part of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Staff and Private Opportunities

After obtaining the wherewithal, the paramount objective in creating a Northern Ireland Area Service has to be to avoid placing extra pressure upon the resources of the main museums here. Under present circumstances the latter, whatever their feelings about adopting a ‘pastoral’ role towards a new body,’ cannot in practice easily act either as hosts to it on their premises or as agents working on its behalf. The solution lies in independently appointed staff working in-house, a system which at the same time should put to rest the unease about sharing between the local museums that the Morris Report

aroused. Nevertheless, as elsewhere, a proportion of the work done by a future Area Service

will have to be contracted out for expediency. The need for this has often been emphasized, most recently in advice given to the Scottish Museums Council, following the Scottish Office’s response to recommendations made in 1986 by a Museums and Galleries Commission Working Party. lo Doing so obviously reduces institutional overheads. Permanent staff are not seen as fully cost-effective until fully occupied! Occasionally in the past some of the services on offer through some of the Area Services have not been taken up as much by museums as might have been anticipated. Measures have been needed to try to encourage use, and even these have not always succeeded completely. ” In this respect, therefore, it is extremely helpful that the private sector has expanded in Northern Ireland, and can now do rather more than it could when Morris reported only a few years ago. Notably, extra conservators are now available, some holding high qualifications. Most are already known professionally to prospective clients, and under an Area Service they should be encouraged.

Location

Locating a future Area Service in the right place is fundamental. Experience shows that a contactors’ bureau can function from just about anywhere. If that turns out to be all that is wanted in Northern Ireland, and if it works, then the same rules apply. A more self-sufficient organization is rather harder to accommodate, besides being dearer to run. Belfast, though, probably is the best place from which to operate, at least by analogy with developments elsewhere.

90 Northern Ireland - The Tenth Area Museums Service?

Over the years the drive has been to base Area Services near to substantial population centres, taking advantage of the wide range of human skills and other resources there. Most now exist in or very close to regional capitals or major towns, often using the facilities provided by large provincial museums and galleries. From the organizational angle this is seen as a strength, not a weakness, although sometimes low salaries and high urban living costs do cause recruitment problems.

For Northern Ireland the message is plain. Throwing an Area Service into the countryside, as some here want to do, for purely geographical reasons perhaps, is unlikely to achieve much if work keeps returning to where the best facilities to do it have remained: in this case, in Greater Belfast. Some fragmentation of operations on the mainland may occasionally be justified because of special factors, not least the larger number of clients. ‘* Here the same arg ument does not apply, and decentralization is not the answer.

The alternative, that of quartering the Area Service on one of the present regional museums, is sustainable only while the principal axis of current regional museum life follows a single track running from Enniskillen through Armagh to Downpatrick, with a relatively minor kink northwards towards Lisburn. It takes no account of future changes nor, indeed, of some of those which have already taken place. Eventually these are likely to give rise to a very different axis, embracing towns in the far northwest of the Province and mid-Antrim. Under those circumstances an Area Service centred, for example, on Armagh has a communications advantage little better than would exist if it were centred instead on Belfast, which clearly is well connected with most places likely to see fresh museum developments.

Conclusion

An Area Museums Service is one of several ways for improving both the structure and the standard of the broad museum service, as well as for getting more money into it. In Northern Ireland it would be unlikely to work to its best effect until fundamental administrative and financial issues beyond its own immediate competence were settled. Possibly the ground for this could be prepared through the normal machinary of an Area Council or its equivaIent. Area Councils, though, are not regulatory authorities with compelling legal powers; they rely heavily upon consensus and voluntary cooperation among their members. If serious difficulty is anticipated here, then less familiar devices may have to be tried first, or even fresh legislation, in order to produce some form of binding strategy for future museum development in the Province. An organization of any size would probably be less handicapped in its work operating from the Belfast region than from a small country town. Whatever the outcome, if the tenth Area Service does come to Northern Ireland it will be the smallest yet in terms both of population and the number of local museums and similar centres which it serves. For that reason, under the present system of funding Area Services it may take some considerable time to reach a reasonable level of effectiveness without some fairly innovatory financial provision from either public or private sources.

Notes

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author alone, and represent no other opinion.

1. Museums and Galleries Commission, Review of Area Museum Councils and Services (Report by a Working Party, 1984) passim. North West Museum and Art Gallery Service, Area Museum

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Councils (nd. but 1978, rev. 1983): 4-12. S. Locke, ‘The Development of Area Museum Councils as a System of National Support for Local Museums’, Museums Journal, 83: 1 (1983): 31-35. G. Farnell, ‘The Council for Museums and Galleries in Scotland: a Decade of Development’, Museums Journal, 83:l (1983): 37-40.

2. Museums and Galleries Commission, Review of Museums in Northern Ireland, (Report by a Working Party, 1983, ‘The Morris Report’).

3. Department of Education for Northern Ireland, Regional Museums in Northern Ireland (Belfast: HMSO, 1978): 47. Report by a DENI-appointed Working Party under W. G. Malcolm.

4. Ibid. p.41. 5. Northern Ireland Assembly, Education Committee, The Musetern Service in sorties Ireland,

presented as the Seventeenth Report of the Education Committee to the Assembly, 1985, two volumes.

6. Op. cit. note 3, p.50. 7. Review of Area Museum Councils and Services, op. cit. note 1, p.28. 8. For example, an initiative regarding conservation services by the Area Museum Council for the

South West, announced during autumn 1989. See also G. Farnell, ‘Promoting Excellence: the Work of the Scottish Museums Council’, Museums Journal, 86:1 (1986): 50-55.

9. See A. Laing, ‘Local Museums in Wales and the Council of Museums in Wales’, Museums Journal, 83:l (1983): 41-44.

10. Conservation News, No. 36, July 1988, p.3. 11. Review of Area Mtiseum Cot~nciis and Services, op. cit. note 1, pp. 66-67. 12. Ibid. pp.64-65, 68-70, 72.