There was a time in Northern Ireland when the discovery of a cache of guns in a cupboard would have been a matter for the police. But 10 ancient rifles dating from the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, recently unearthed in a long-forgotten cupboard, will not now become exhibits in a prosecution. Instead, they will occupy pride of place in a tiny museum in an Orange Hall in Belfast.
The rifles, part of a massive shipment of 25,000 smuggled into Northern Ireland in 1914, at the height of the dispute over Home Rule, are part of a new museum at Clifton Street Orange Hall, which opened in June 2015 and is one of a wave of community-based museums springing up across Northern Ireland. Besides Clifton Street, there are centres devoted to Orange heritage in Belfast and Armagh. And in Derry, the Protestant Apprentice Boys have developed a new museum about the 1688-89 siege of the city; Derry’s Siege Museum opened last October.
The other side of the political divide is presented at the Irish Republican History Museum in west Belfast. And the Museum of Free Derry, which looks at the civil rights era of the 1960s and the Troubles during the 1970s, plans to reopen in October this year (see facing page).
The Orange Order was set up in 1795 to celebrate the 1688-89 triumph of the Protestant King William III of Orange over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne. It sees itself as defending Protestant civil and religious liberties and has been strongly intertwined with the Unionist political tradition in Northern Ireland. The Order organises the colourful 12 July marches, which are seen as a historic pageant and a tourist attraction.
But critics have accused the Order of sectarianism and triumphalism, and there’s been considerable controversy over Orange marches through Nationalist, predominantly Catholic, areas.
Ireland’s history, like the country itself, is a contested area. But the historic antagonisms that gave rise to the conflict in Northern Ireland could themselves be the source of improved community relations. An increased awareness and understanding of the past, say some observers, could help reinforce the current peace process.
Take the Museum of Orange Heritage, which opened in Belfast last year amid some fanfare, including a ceremony attended by Mary McAleese, the former president of the Irish Republic. The former local council HQ at Schomberg House has had a £3.6m makeover, transforming it into a modern interpretation centre with exhibition spaces, research and education facilities, and a cafe. The museum also has a smaller, rural base in Loughgall, Armagh.
Much of the funding for the museums came from the European Union’s Peace III programme, which is designed to promote shared spaces and reconciliation through education. Two of its major aims are to “acknowledge the past” and to “create shared public spaces”. So a publicly accessible museum is a major step forward for the Orange Order, which in its 200-year history of representing Protestant and Unionist interests has earned a reputation for guarding its privacy.
Curator Jonathan Mattison says that the Order first collected material for a putative museum more than 100 years ago, but the materials and artefacts were stored and forgotten about until recently.
Many of the key historic objects come from the era of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89, when the Dutch, and Protestant, King William III of Orange unseated the Catholic King James II and won a protracted victory in Ireland.
William’s ornate brocade saddlecloth, a pair of stout brown gauntlets, and the last letter he wrote before coming to Ireland, are all on display at the Museum of Orange Heritage. Other exhibits include a musket used by a Jacobite soldier in the Siege of Derry, banners and flags, and the boyhood collarette (similar to a ruff) worn by footballer George Best, whose father was an Orangeman. Also on display is memorabilia from Orange lodges set up as far afield as Ghana and Canada. Indeed, the Native Americans of the Mohawk Loyal Orange Lodge – no.99, in Ontario – have sent a photo of themselves in feather headdresses and fringed orange tunics, proudly bearing the Union flag.
But Mattison, an enthusiastic and welcoming advocate for the Orange tradition, is most proud of the room that recreates a typical Orange hall, as well as a recent video of someone being inducted into the order.
“We are not oath-bound – the Orange Order is not a secret society,” Mattison says. “Through the museums, we want to create better access to our history and by doing so create wider acceptance of our story.”
The committee advising on the creation of the museum included a Catholic headmaster who, Mattison says, “asked many of the awkward questions that we probably would not have thought of ourselves.” He adds: “We want to demystify what the Orange Order is all about, where we’re coming from, our place in history and the modern world. We’re open to challenging conversations.”
They take outreach work seriously: Mattison says they produce and distribute Key Stage 2 workbooks, and a travelling box of artefacts goes on tour with them to schools. The Friends of the Museum help pay the costs for visiting those schools, and the Orange Order’s headquarters, the Grand Orange Lodge, runs its own education programme, which is mainly taken up by Catholic schools.
The museum, which runs with just two full-time staff and a clutch of volunteers, is hoping for Accreditation in 2017. So far, it has attracted some 7,500 visitors in its first six months (out of a target of 10,000 in the first 12 months).
“It’s hard to say how many of those will not come from a Protestant background,” says Mattison, “but it’s interesting that we have had feedback forms written in Irish.”
The Museum of Orange Heritage was initially condemned by some as a propaganda exercise – the Order even had to remove a billboard advertising the museum opening because of complaints from Nationalists.
Danger may lurk in the wings with this new wave of museums representing both political sides – will they simply reinforce pre-existing prejudices?
Single-identity museums
Chris Bailey, the chief executive of the Northern Ireland Museums Council, doesn’t think so. He praises the fact that in most cases, these “single-identity” museums have brought in interpretation specialists to ensure that they present a more independent view of events rather than one simply based on emotional appeal.
“Not that I am against emotional portrayals,” Bailey says. “The Museum of Free Derry, in particular, is informed by a specific incident, about which there is considerable emotion, so the museum uses language that reflects that depth of feeling.”
Bailey adds that all museums express a community of geography, experience or interest. “Community museums are very deeply rooted,” he says. “It’s a point that plays strongly in their favour.” He believes that single-identity museums are part of the process of getting to grips with the broad spectrum of Northern Ireland’s history.
Elizabeth Crooke, the professor of museum and heritage studies at the University of Ulster, says that many of the new community museums are continuations of exhibitions and displays of ephemera that have been put together over decades. They might prove to be more resilient because they “have an obvious hinterland” and a track record of support, unlike Derry’s Workhouse museum and Foyle Valley Railway museum which failed to survive, “perhaps because, at the end of the day, they did not have a community to back them”, she says.
Sharing stories
However, Crooke adds, public funding has brought with it the requirement to provide access to all audiences. “The important thing to remember is that anybody can go to these museums, and they can disagree with the text on the walls if they want. It’s a door that wasn’t open before.”
Discussions about “shared history” have not only been taking place inside museums, Crooke adds. Meetings of Somme history groups, and forums on the Living Legacies 1914-18 Engagement Centre website, which examines wartime stories, have proven to be effective spaces for cross-community learning.
Crooke points to other significant developments. For example, the Unionist faction, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, has held an event on St Patrick’s Day for the last two years, a date normally celebrated only by Nationalists. And vice versa – Inniskillings Museum, a regimental museum in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, found a Republican flag flown during the Rising in its stores and returned it to Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland, in time for the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising.
“There is an increase in understanding, but it won’t happen overnight,” Crooke says.
But not everyone is convinced. The cultural commentator Malachi O’Doherty argues that while single-identity museums are open to all in theory, there are practical barriers to communities entering a museum building in what is traditionally considered hostile territory.
“It’s all very well saying they can come, but whether they will is another matter,” O’Doherty says.
He is concerned, too, that giving public funding to private, sectional interest museums can look like government endorsement. “I have fears about history being rewritten to accommodate the paramilitary campaigns and justify them, but I begin to think it is the responsibility of thinkers, academics, writers and artists to deal with that, not for the state to silence those who are constructing that history.”
The museum’s aim is to tell the story of the civil rights era of the 1960s and its aftermath, culminating in Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers opened fire on protestors and killed 13 people. The museum and archive, which contains 25,000 items, grew out of a campaign to tell the true story of the incident, which eventually led to a major public inquiry.
Activists bought three abandoned flats near the entrance to Free Derry – the nationalist (mainly Catholic) area that resisted the presence of soldiers and police in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Museum of Free Derry opened in 2007.
Through artefacts and eyewitness accounts, the museum tells the story of this part of the city, the civil rights campaign, the street battles, internment and the conflict’s aftermath. The display includes bloodstained banners and the white handkerchief waved by Father Edward Daly as he attended the dying – the iconic image of Bloody Sunday beamed to television screens across the world.
“We are telling our story,” says Adrian Kerr, the director of the museum. “There is the official account, but we show the community’s account. There was a feeling that we needed to preserve everything we could about the context of the era so that we could promote an understanding of what happened on Bloody Sunday as the culmination of a sequence of events, not just one event.”
Kerr hopes that the new facilities, such as a proper reception area, more extensive exhibition and research areas and an education space will attract more visitors. The museum will also be launching a major oral history project to coincide with its reopening. The transformation has been paid for by a combination of grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, both governments in Ireland and Derry City Council.
Kerr admits that the museum he runs is “unashamedly subjective”. He adds: “People here don’t want an academic account, they want a personal account, which is telling the story from the point of view of people who lived here at the time.”
He is scathing about attempts to discuss the causes of the Troubles or their impact objectively, including efforts made by National Museums Northern Ireland. Kerr says: “Cold facts and figures convey no human feeling whatsoever.”
Kerr believes that a partisan view of the past can contribute to good community relations. He points out that the Museum of Free Derry and the Apprentice Boys’ Siege Museum are both part of local history tours and that both museums regularly refer visitors to each other.
“I don’t think we have to agree before we can understand,” he says.
Patrick Kelly is a freelance journalist
The rifles, part of a massive shipment of 25,000 smuggled into Northern Ireland in 1914, at the height of the dispute over Home Rule, are part of a new museum at Clifton Street Orange Hall, which opened in June 2015 and is one of a wave of community-based museums springing up across Northern Ireland. Besides Clifton Street, there are centres devoted to Orange heritage in Belfast and Armagh. And in Derry, the Protestant Apprentice Boys have developed a new museum about the 1688-89 siege of the city; Derry’s Siege Museum opened last October.
The other side of the political divide is presented at the Irish Republican History Museum in west Belfast. And the Museum of Free Derry, which looks at the civil rights era of the 1960s and the Troubles during the 1970s, plans to reopen in October this year (see facing page).
The Orange Order was set up in 1795 to celebrate the 1688-89 triumph of the Protestant King William III of Orange over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne. It sees itself as defending Protestant civil and religious liberties and has been strongly intertwined with the Unionist political tradition in Northern Ireland. The Order organises the colourful 12 July marches, which are seen as a historic pageant and a tourist attraction.
But critics have accused the Order of sectarianism and triumphalism, and there’s been considerable controversy over Orange marches through Nationalist, predominantly Catholic, areas.
Ireland’s history, like the country itself, is a contested area. But the historic antagonisms that gave rise to the conflict in Northern Ireland could themselves be the source of improved community relations. An increased awareness and understanding of the past, say some observers, could help reinforce the current peace process.
Take the Museum of Orange Heritage, which opened in Belfast last year amid some fanfare, including a ceremony attended by Mary McAleese, the former president of the Irish Republic. The former local council HQ at Schomberg House has had a £3.6m makeover, transforming it into a modern interpretation centre with exhibition spaces, research and education facilities, and a cafe. The museum also has a smaller, rural base in Loughgall, Armagh.
Much of the funding for the museums came from the European Union’s Peace III programme, which is designed to promote shared spaces and reconciliation through education. Two of its major aims are to “acknowledge the past” and to “create shared public spaces”. So a publicly accessible museum is a major step forward for the Orange Order, which in its 200-year history of representing Protestant and Unionist interests has earned a reputation for guarding its privacy.
Curator Jonathan Mattison says that the Order first collected material for a putative museum more than 100 years ago, but the materials and artefacts were stored and forgotten about until recently.
Many of the key historic objects come from the era of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89, when the Dutch, and Protestant, King William III of Orange unseated the Catholic King James II and won a protracted victory in Ireland.
William’s ornate brocade saddlecloth, a pair of stout brown gauntlets, and the last letter he wrote before coming to Ireland, are all on display at the Museum of Orange Heritage. Other exhibits include a musket used by a Jacobite soldier in the Siege of Derry, banners and flags, and the boyhood collarette (similar to a ruff) worn by footballer George Best, whose father was an Orangeman. Also on display is memorabilia from Orange lodges set up as far afield as Ghana and Canada. Indeed, the Native Americans of the Mohawk Loyal Orange Lodge – no.99, in Ontario – have sent a photo of themselves in feather headdresses and fringed orange tunics, proudly bearing the Union flag.
But Mattison, an enthusiastic and welcoming advocate for the Orange tradition, is most proud of the room that recreates a typical Orange hall, as well as a recent video of someone being inducted into the order.
“We are not oath-bound – the Orange Order is not a secret society,” Mattison says. “Through the museums, we want to create better access to our history and by doing so create wider acceptance of our story.”
The committee advising on the creation of the museum included a Catholic headmaster who, Mattison says, “asked many of the awkward questions that we probably would not have thought of ourselves.” He adds: “We want to demystify what the Orange Order is all about, where we’re coming from, our place in history and the modern world. We’re open to challenging conversations.”
They take outreach work seriously: Mattison says they produce and distribute Key Stage 2 workbooks, and a travelling box of artefacts goes on tour with them to schools. The Friends of the Museum help pay the costs for visiting those schools, and the Orange Order’s headquarters, the Grand Orange Lodge, runs its own education programme, which is mainly taken up by Catholic schools.
The museum, which runs with just two full-time staff and a clutch of volunteers, is hoping for Accreditation in 2017. So far, it has attracted some 7,500 visitors in its first six months (out of a target of 10,000 in the first 12 months).
“It’s hard to say how many of those will not come from a Protestant background,” says Mattison, “but it’s interesting that we have had feedback forms written in Irish.”
The Museum of Orange Heritage was initially condemned by some as a propaganda exercise – the Order even had to remove a billboard advertising the museum opening because of complaints from Nationalists.
Danger may lurk in the wings with this new wave of museums representing both political sides – will they simply reinforce pre-existing prejudices?
We want to demystify what the Orange Order is all about, where we’re coming from, our place in history and the modern world. We’re open to challenging conversations"
Single-identity museums
Chris Bailey, the chief executive of the Northern Ireland Museums Council, doesn’t think so. He praises the fact that in most cases, these “single-identity” museums have brought in interpretation specialists to ensure that they present a more independent view of events rather than one simply based on emotional appeal.
“Not that I am against emotional portrayals,” Bailey says. “The Museum of Free Derry, in particular, is informed by a specific incident, about which there is considerable emotion, so the museum uses language that reflects that depth of feeling.”
Bailey adds that all museums express a community of geography, experience or interest. “Community museums are very deeply rooted,” he says. “It’s a point that plays strongly in their favour.” He believes that single-identity museums are part of the process of getting to grips with the broad spectrum of Northern Ireland’s history.
Elizabeth Crooke, the professor of museum and heritage studies at the University of Ulster, says that many of the new community museums are continuations of exhibitions and displays of ephemera that have been put together over decades. They might prove to be more resilient because they “have an obvious hinterland” and a track record of support, unlike Derry’s Workhouse museum and Foyle Valley Railway museum which failed to survive, “perhaps because, at the end of the day, they did not have a community to back them”, she says.
The important thing to remember is that anybody can go to these museums, and they can disagree with the text on the walls if they want. It’s a door that wasn’t open before"
Sharing stories
However, Crooke adds, public funding has brought with it the requirement to provide access to all audiences. “The important thing to remember is that anybody can go to these museums, and they can disagree with the text on the walls if they want. It’s a door that wasn’t open before.”
Discussions about “shared history” have not only been taking place inside museums, Crooke adds. Meetings of Somme history groups, and forums on the Living Legacies 1914-18 Engagement Centre website, which examines wartime stories, have proven to be effective spaces for cross-community learning.
Crooke points to other significant developments. For example, the Unionist faction, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, has held an event on St Patrick’s Day for the last two years, a date normally celebrated only by Nationalists. And vice versa – Inniskillings Museum, a regimental museum in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, found a Republican flag flown during the Rising in its stores and returned it to Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland, in time for the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising.
“There is an increase in understanding, but it won’t happen overnight,” Crooke says.
But not everyone is convinced. The cultural commentator Malachi O’Doherty argues that while single-identity museums are open to all in theory, there are practical barriers to communities entering a museum building in what is traditionally considered hostile territory.
“It’s all very well saying they can come, but whether they will is another matter,” O’Doherty says.
He is concerned, too, that giving public funding to private, sectional interest museums can look like government endorsement. “I have fears about history being rewritten to accommodate the paramilitary campaigns and justify them, but I begin to think it is the responsibility of thinkers, academics, writers and artists to deal with that, not for the state to silence those who are constructing that history.”
Museum of Free Derry
The Museum of Free Derry will reopen later this year after a £2.4m refurbishment. It is in a community centre in the heart of the city’s Bogside area, which bore the brunt of the conflict during the Troubles.The museum’s aim is to tell the story of the civil rights era of the 1960s and its aftermath, culminating in Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers opened fire on protestors and killed 13 people. The museum and archive, which contains 25,000 items, grew out of a campaign to tell the true story of the incident, which eventually led to a major public inquiry.
Activists bought three abandoned flats near the entrance to Free Derry – the nationalist (mainly Catholic) area that resisted the presence of soldiers and police in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Museum of Free Derry opened in 2007.
Through artefacts and eyewitness accounts, the museum tells the story of this part of the city, the civil rights campaign, the street battles, internment and the conflict’s aftermath. The display includes bloodstained banners and the white handkerchief waved by Father Edward Daly as he attended the dying – the iconic image of Bloody Sunday beamed to television screens across the world.
“We are telling our story,” says Adrian Kerr, the director of the museum. “There is the official account, but we show the community’s account. There was a feeling that we needed to preserve everything we could about the context of the era so that we could promote an understanding of what happened on Bloody Sunday as the culmination of a sequence of events, not just one event.”
Kerr hopes that the new facilities, such as a proper reception area, more extensive exhibition and research areas and an education space will attract more visitors. The museum will also be launching a major oral history project to coincide with its reopening. The transformation has been paid for by a combination of grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, both governments in Ireland and Derry City Council.
Kerr admits that the museum he runs is “unashamedly subjective”. He adds: “People here don’t want an academic account, they want a personal account, which is telling the story from the point of view of people who lived here at the time.”
He is scathing about attempts to discuss the causes of the Troubles or their impact objectively, including efforts made by National Museums Northern Ireland. Kerr says: “Cold facts and figures convey no human feeling whatsoever.”
Kerr believes that a partisan view of the past can contribute to good community relations. He points out that the Museum of Free Derry and the Apprentice Boys’ Siege Museum are both part of local history tours and that both museums regularly refer visitors to each other.
“I don’t think we have to agree before we can understand,” he says.
Patrick Kelly is a freelance journalist