With a population of just 1.7 million, a mainly agricultural economy and a struggling tourist industry, it's understandable that museum provision in Northern Ireland has traditionally been poor. Outside the main cities of Belfast and Derry and the four museums looked after by National Museums Northern Ireland, museums are few and far between and visitor figures are low.
Now, within a climate of peace and partnerships since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland's complex and compelling history is starting to be shared. Antrim, the most north-easterly of the six counties and the one with the strongest connections to Scotland, has stolen a lead by setting up a regional museum partnership that enables small local authority museums to share resources and plan strategically.
'It's impossible for small councils to develop full-blown museum services in miniature,' says William Blair, the museums service officer for the Mid-Antrim Museums Service, a partnership between the borough and district councils of Ballymena, Larne, Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey.
The four councils have been working on four capital projects in areas that previously had little or no museum provision. 'Each council had its own motives for joining the partnership, but all needed to move in a new direction,' Blair says.
Ballymena, where Blair and a new museums access officer are based, is the lead partner with a new-build project called The Braid. The name has various local associations, but also suggests the intertwining of arts, heritage and civic elements on one site, which will feature the Mid-Antrim Museum, the Arts Centre and the existing Town Hall, which is being refurbished. The museum is being designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates and the project is scheduled for completion in March 2008.
Larne Museum, a small rural collection in a 100-year-old Carnegie library, has been given a 21st-century facelift and reopened in October 2005. Carrickfergus, a small but historic town on Belfast Lough, opened its new museum and civic centre in a remodelled building in March 2005. And Sentry Hill is a historic farmhouse in Newtownabbey that was once the home of the Presbyterian McKinney family. It was remodelled as a museum and community resource in April 2005.
Staff at these museums have been working from temporary or outmoded premises and have had to build collections alongside construction projects, exhibition programmes and community outreach work. It's taken the best part of a decade, but all the hard work is starting to show results, says Blair. 'It's an exciting time with new developments being driven by local councils instead of nationals.'
Funding has come from a variety of sources, including the Heritage Lottery Fund (which has given the Mid-Antrim Museums Service about £6m), the European Union Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the Border Region of Ireland.
The Mid-Antrim Museums Service was set up in 1998 and its success has meant proven benefits for its partners. A strong exhibition programme, some site specific and some touring, has enabled new relationships to be forged on local community, cross-border, national and even international levels. This has given curators access to new material.
'Working with local groups has been invaluable,' says Blair. 'Northern Ireland has a complicated sectarian history and geography, and museums can play a positive role even by just revealing this. If you can show how it's often shades of grey and not black and white you are making progress.'
Blair believes, however, that the story of the Troubles belongs in a national museum, and that focus for the Mid-Antrim Museums Service should be on the common history of the county and how everybody is interlinked.
'It's important not to shy away from difficult periods of history - for a start, they are often the most fascinating,' Blair says. 'But there are many areas where Catholic and Protestant divisions just don't pertain. A good example is our 1970s touring exhibition.
'We were making the subtle point that yes, our society was convulsing during that decade, but people still got on with their lives. There was no mass exodus, and people remember everyday stuff like space hoppers, flares and punk music. It's the normal alongside the abnormal, and that's how people lived.'
Another example where the common threads of Northern Irish history preside over the divisions is world war one, says Blair. 'The Larne gun runners, for example, who armed the UVF in 1914 during the Home Rule crisis, were men who two years later found themselves fighting side by side with Catholics on the Somme.'
It's also about developing different audiences. 'It can be a big thing for people to represent themselves outside their own community,' Blair explains. 'So we use exhibitions like this as a vehicle to establish contact.'
The Community History Programme (CHP), funded through the European Union Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, is another aspect of the service that aims to make connections with diverse communities and across sectarian divides.
'CHP is important because it's signalling our intentions,' says Blair. 'It is challenging, because we aim to recruit groups from geographically or socially marginalised areas, both loyalist and nationalist estates, for example. We want to reach people who wouldn't usually have the opportunity to explore and express their history.'
Newtownabbey Borough Council bought Sentry Hill in 1996. It was a private house, but one with a remarkable time-capsule collection. William Fee McKinney, who was born in 1832 and lived in the house for most of his life, was a typical Victorian collector, interested in local history and photography. So Sentry Hill charts the social history of the area and the emergence of a rural middle class.
'We are telling different strands of Irish history through the family, and this is its strength,' says Samantha Curry, the museums and heritage officer for Newtownabbey council. 'People respond because it tells a human story on a human scale. For instance, the son Tom had been to agricultural college and was set to carry on the farm but was killed on the Somme and with him went those ways of life.
'Many local people have connections with Sentry Hill and people have responded well to the visit,' says Curry. 'We are now coming out of the capital phase and into the programming and marketing.'
CHP is an integral part. A field has been given over for a community allotment, and locals will be able to set up stalls and sell produce. 'We have had jazz events, teddy bears' picnics and we are applying for a wedding licence. It's a safe family day out that cuts across the sectarian divide.'
Carrickfergus Castle dates from the 12th century and is one of Northern Ireland's most popular tourist attractions, but the town had no home-grown museum collection. The new museum replaces an earlier heritage attraction called Knight Ride. Helen Rankin, the curator of the Carrickfergus Museum, says Knight Ride undersold the town's long history and strategic importance.
'It was a caricature of our history, which focused exclusively on the medieval period,' Rankin says. 'In fact, Carrick is the most excavated town in Northern Ireland and we have built a collection with objects from the Mesolithic era right up to the present day.'
The site of the museum was once a Franciscan Friary, the home of Arthur Chichester who was sent by Elizabeth I to strengthen the English presence in Ulster. It was later the town hall and jail.
The collection reflects these layers of history and includes a skeleton of a Barbary ape, probably kept by the Franciscans as a pet, and ceramic tiles made in Devon in 1615 and brought over with Chichester's retinue. It is a well-used and accessible space that also houses the civic centre, as well as the museum elements of open storage, community archive, exhibition space, cafe and museum shop.
'The lending institutions have been incredibly supportive,' says Rankin, 'The tiles came from the British Museum and the Royal Armouries in Leeds gave us chain mail with a tiny crown stamped on the joints. We also got material from personal collections such as letters and papers of the local poet Louis MacNeice, kindly donated by his son in America.'
Sean Neeson, a local councillor and board member of National Museums Northern Ireland, says: 'It's now a dignified collection properly displayed in its home town for the first time. It's established new standards for local and regional museums in Northern Ireland. The quality of loans show that we're held in high esteem. The community archive is also important to us because it reflects our emphasis on outreach.'
In Ballymena some surprising relationships have been nurtured. A Latin bible from Cistercian monks at a nearby monastery was loaned for the Popular Beliefs exhibition. 'We sometimes need brokers to give local people confidence to loan material,' says Jayne Clarke, the curator of the Ballymena Museum. And with that confidence comes trust. 'We've learned that we don't have to collect to produce exhibitions,' says Clarke.
Clarke collaborated with a local newspaper editor on a world war one exhibition that turned up a local slant and access to material she would otherwise never had known about. And it's not just a temporary arrangement; Clarke is now writing a book with the editor.
This openness is reflected in the new museum, which will have a transparency not just in architectural terms (the designs feature lots of glass), but as a symbolic presence. 'The idea is that we reconnect with the townscape and the landscape beyond and that people take ownership and see the building as having a presence even when it's not open,' adds Clarke.
A challenge for museums will be the run-up to 2009 when local government in Northern Ireland will be reorganised, with 26 councils being streamlined to just seven. The Northern Ireland Museums Council (NIMC) is working on an advocacy document to help museum services respond, and the success of the Mid-Antrim Museums Service means it is likely to be a model for future partnerships.
So far, there are only two regional partnerships - Mid-Antrim Museums Service and the Causeway Museum Service, which was established in 1996 by the four local authorities of Coleraine, Limavady, Moyle and Ballymoney.
'They've both been successful, producing results that coordinate within culturally linked areas,' says Briony Crozier, the assistant director of the NIMC. 'It will be interesting to see how councils and museums will group their expertise together. There are councils that haven't worked before in this way, and who will have new heritage functions they haven't had before.'
Northern Ireland is facing up to the past and building positive relationships on many levels. And Blair says museums are well placed not only to preserve but also to develop local identity.
'We have a robust sense of identity here and opinion runs in such a big spectrum that you'll always offend someone,' Blair says. 'But that's not a reason not to try. Splendid isolation isn't an option any more.'
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
www.mid-antrimmuseums.org
Now, within a climate of peace and partnerships since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland's complex and compelling history is starting to be shared. Antrim, the most north-easterly of the six counties and the one with the strongest connections to Scotland, has stolen a lead by setting up a regional museum partnership that enables small local authority museums to share resources and plan strategically.
'It's impossible for small councils to develop full-blown museum services in miniature,' says William Blair, the museums service officer for the Mid-Antrim Museums Service, a partnership between the borough and district councils of Ballymena, Larne, Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey.
The four councils have been working on four capital projects in areas that previously had little or no museum provision. 'Each council had its own motives for joining the partnership, but all needed to move in a new direction,' Blair says.
Ballymena, where Blair and a new museums access officer are based, is the lead partner with a new-build project called The Braid. The name has various local associations, but also suggests the intertwining of arts, heritage and civic elements on one site, which will feature the Mid-Antrim Museum, the Arts Centre and the existing Town Hall, which is being refurbished. The museum is being designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates and the project is scheduled for completion in March 2008.
Larne Museum, a small rural collection in a 100-year-old Carnegie library, has been given a 21st-century facelift and reopened in October 2005. Carrickfergus, a small but historic town on Belfast Lough, opened its new museum and civic centre in a remodelled building in March 2005. And Sentry Hill is a historic farmhouse in Newtownabbey that was once the home of the Presbyterian McKinney family. It was remodelled as a museum and community resource in April 2005.
Staff at these museums have been working from temporary or outmoded premises and have had to build collections alongside construction projects, exhibition programmes and community outreach work. It's taken the best part of a decade, but all the hard work is starting to show results, says Blair. 'It's an exciting time with new developments being driven by local councils instead of nationals.'
Funding has come from a variety of sources, including the Heritage Lottery Fund (which has given the Mid-Antrim Museums Service about £6m), the European Union Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the Border Region of Ireland.
The Mid-Antrim Museums Service was set up in 1998 and its success has meant proven benefits for its partners. A strong exhibition programme, some site specific and some touring, has enabled new relationships to be forged on local community, cross-border, national and even international levels. This has given curators access to new material.
'Working with local groups has been invaluable,' says Blair. 'Northern Ireland has a complicated sectarian history and geography, and museums can play a positive role even by just revealing this. If you can show how it's often shades of grey and not black and white you are making progress.'
Blair believes, however, that the story of the Troubles belongs in a national museum, and that focus for the Mid-Antrim Museums Service should be on the common history of the county and how everybody is interlinked.
'It's important not to shy away from difficult periods of history - for a start, they are often the most fascinating,' Blair says. 'But there are many areas where Catholic and Protestant divisions just don't pertain. A good example is our 1970s touring exhibition.
'We were making the subtle point that yes, our society was convulsing during that decade, but people still got on with their lives. There was no mass exodus, and people remember everyday stuff like space hoppers, flares and punk music. It's the normal alongside the abnormal, and that's how people lived.'
Another example where the common threads of Northern Irish history preside over the divisions is world war one, says Blair. 'The Larne gun runners, for example, who armed the UVF in 1914 during the Home Rule crisis, were men who two years later found themselves fighting side by side with Catholics on the Somme.'
It's also about developing different audiences. 'It can be a big thing for people to represent themselves outside their own community,' Blair explains. 'So we use exhibitions like this as a vehicle to establish contact.'
The Community History Programme (CHP), funded through the European Union Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, is another aspect of the service that aims to make connections with diverse communities and across sectarian divides.
'CHP is important because it's signalling our intentions,' says Blair. 'It is challenging, because we aim to recruit groups from geographically or socially marginalised areas, both loyalist and nationalist estates, for example. We want to reach people who wouldn't usually have the opportunity to explore and express their history.'
Newtownabbey Borough Council bought Sentry Hill in 1996. It was a private house, but one with a remarkable time-capsule collection. William Fee McKinney, who was born in 1832 and lived in the house for most of his life, was a typical Victorian collector, interested in local history and photography. So Sentry Hill charts the social history of the area and the emergence of a rural middle class.
'We are telling different strands of Irish history through the family, and this is its strength,' says Samantha Curry, the museums and heritage officer for Newtownabbey council. 'People respond because it tells a human story on a human scale. For instance, the son Tom had been to agricultural college and was set to carry on the farm but was killed on the Somme and with him went those ways of life.
'Many local people have connections with Sentry Hill and people have responded well to the visit,' says Curry. 'We are now coming out of the capital phase and into the programming and marketing.'
CHP is an integral part. A field has been given over for a community allotment, and locals will be able to set up stalls and sell produce. 'We have had jazz events, teddy bears' picnics and we are applying for a wedding licence. It's a safe family day out that cuts across the sectarian divide.'
Carrickfergus Castle dates from the 12th century and is one of Northern Ireland's most popular tourist attractions, but the town had no home-grown museum collection. The new museum replaces an earlier heritage attraction called Knight Ride. Helen Rankin, the curator of the Carrickfergus Museum, says Knight Ride undersold the town's long history and strategic importance.
'It was a caricature of our history, which focused exclusively on the medieval period,' Rankin says. 'In fact, Carrick is the most excavated town in Northern Ireland and we have built a collection with objects from the Mesolithic era right up to the present day.'
The site of the museum was once a Franciscan Friary, the home of Arthur Chichester who was sent by Elizabeth I to strengthen the English presence in Ulster. It was later the town hall and jail.
The collection reflects these layers of history and includes a skeleton of a Barbary ape, probably kept by the Franciscans as a pet, and ceramic tiles made in Devon in 1615 and brought over with Chichester's retinue. It is a well-used and accessible space that also houses the civic centre, as well as the museum elements of open storage, community archive, exhibition space, cafe and museum shop.
'The lending institutions have been incredibly supportive,' says Rankin, 'The tiles came from the British Museum and the Royal Armouries in Leeds gave us chain mail with a tiny crown stamped on the joints. We also got material from personal collections such as letters and papers of the local poet Louis MacNeice, kindly donated by his son in America.'
Sean Neeson, a local councillor and board member of National Museums Northern Ireland, says: 'It's now a dignified collection properly displayed in its home town for the first time. It's established new standards for local and regional museums in Northern Ireland. The quality of loans show that we're held in high esteem. The community archive is also important to us because it reflects our emphasis on outreach.'
In Ballymena some surprising relationships have been nurtured. A Latin bible from Cistercian monks at a nearby monastery was loaned for the Popular Beliefs exhibition. 'We sometimes need brokers to give local people confidence to loan material,' says Jayne Clarke, the curator of the Ballymena Museum. And with that confidence comes trust. 'We've learned that we don't have to collect to produce exhibitions,' says Clarke.
Clarke collaborated with a local newspaper editor on a world war one exhibition that turned up a local slant and access to material she would otherwise never had known about. And it's not just a temporary arrangement; Clarke is now writing a book with the editor.
This openness is reflected in the new museum, which will have a transparency not just in architectural terms (the designs feature lots of glass), but as a symbolic presence. 'The idea is that we reconnect with the townscape and the landscape beyond and that people take ownership and see the building as having a presence even when it's not open,' adds Clarke.
A challenge for museums will be the run-up to 2009 when local government in Northern Ireland will be reorganised, with 26 councils being streamlined to just seven. The Northern Ireland Museums Council (NIMC) is working on an advocacy document to help museum services respond, and the success of the Mid-Antrim Museums Service means it is likely to be a model for future partnerships.
So far, there are only two regional partnerships - Mid-Antrim Museums Service and the Causeway Museum Service, which was established in 1996 by the four local authorities of Coleraine, Limavady, Moyle and Ballymoney.
'They've both been successful, producing results that coordinate within culturally linked areas,' says Briony Crozier, the assistant director of the NIMC. 'It will be interesting to see how councils and museums will group their expertise together. There are councils that haven't worked before in this way, and who will have new heritage functions they haven't had before.'
Northern Ireland is facing up to the past and building positive relationships on many levels. And Blair says museums are well placed not only to preserve but also to develop local identity.
'We have a robust sense of identity here and opinion runs in such a big spectrum that you'll always offend someone,' Blair says. 'But that's not a reason not to try. Splendid isolation isn't an option any more.'
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
www.mid-antrimmuseums.org
