Time was when galleries and museums were for gentry. Not any more, reckons Ciaran McGonigal, new director of Limerick's Hunt Museum. "Culture isn't a matter of class and privilege now," he argues. "It is everyone's civic and civil right - the Hunt is a living witness to that belief."
McGonigal is a fifty-something Dubliner, today celebrating one week as executive director of the best collection of antiquities in Ireland outside the National Museum and National Gallery. He knows some folk are wondering why he moved to Limerick. Simple: he wants to win acknowledgment for the Hunt as the memory bank of the mid-west, and confirm its international quality.
"Museums and galleries reinterpret the whole notion of what people did over a long period of time as a trick or treat process - you either establish the great trick that this is what constituted history, or else you favour the treat of letting people enjoy themselves, letting them realise these objects were once very ordinary things made by very ordinary people for the most part. The Hunt collection tells the endlessly fascinating life of the people."
If the task of a contemporary museum is indeed to tell the story of the people - and the story of the territory - the Hunt collection is uniquely well placed to do both. Perched on Shannon banks much like a Venetian palazzo, the building at once looks out on to the great waterway which linked Limerick and Clare to the rest of the world, and looks into Rutland Street, close to the heart of Limerick's contemporary urban renewal programmes.
"We have wonderful art and artefacts, but their cultural importance is geophysical too. The Shannon links the museum directly to medieval and much earlier bronze age sites, so contextualising the indigenous relationship between the objects and the history of both Limerick and Clare will be a central part of our educational programmes." The collection was developed by John and Gertrude Hunt, who devoted their lives to assembling it, always with a long-term aim of giving it to the Irish State. The Hunts had excavated the Bronze Age remains at Lough Gur, and McGonigal believes their close relationship to that site explains their love of Limerick.
"People don't understand generosity these days. They get worried and think there might be some other agenda, but the Hunts were great and glorious people who understood Limerick's potential as a modern city long before most others. "The collection is valued in excess of £60 million, with so many absolutely unique objects of world importance, and it is really quite extraordinary that their children, John and Trudi, sought to honour their parents' wishes and kept going until our Chair, Tony Ryan, helped them find this wonderful facility."
McGonigal comes to the Hunt Museum from the RHA Gallery in Dublin, which he established as a national venue. He's a serving member of the National Gallery's board, and about to finish a five-year term as a member of the Arts Council. Wholly committed as he is to decentralising arts and culture generally, this move reflects his belief that capital status is not required to be a capital city.
"If the arts belong to the nation, then they belong all round the country, not just concentrated in one metropolitan area. I'm probably very identified with life in Dublin - well it isn't just about Dublin, it's about other places too, and Limerick is a beautiful city with magnificent Georgian buildings and a whole sense of cultural and civic renewal that is very exciting."
McGonigal ascribes much of Limerick's cultural success to the unsung efforts of two people - Brid Dukes, founder of the Belltable Arts Centre and now a director of Dublin's Hallward Gallery, and Dr Edward Walsh, the University of Limerick's president.
"Brid first got me down to Limerick - she made everyone notice the city. Ed Walsh was an extraordinary animateur of the intellectual and business life of the city - now the university has the orchestra, a performing arts centre to be opened next week, a dance company, its own arts officer."
What McGonigal hopes to achieve during his time at the Hunt is to expand Limerick's understanding of its own civic pride to a point where "people recognise that the cultural institutions, like the galleries and Belltable and all the community work orchestrated by such people as Mary Coll, are landmarks in the imagination of the people".
He pooh-poohs Limerick's image as "Stab City." "That's an easy epithet, but to someone who in the last 10 years has been burgled 15 times - and once burnt out by the General - I tell you Dublin is crack city." We talk about the experiences of writers Kate O'Brien and Frank McCourt, both testifying in very different ways to the sense of isolation and powerlessness they felt growing up at a time when their lives and experiences were neither valued nor valid. McCourt's own story bears out McGonigal's beliefs - the writer from the back streets was appointed to the board of the Hunt on the same day McGonigal was appointed its director.
His plans mean changes for other institutions too. "The cultural treasures of the nation must be re-examined: many places are entitled to first-rate collections, or at least to access to them, and if that means re-examining the curatorial and conserving policies of bigger institutions like the National Museum and National Gallery in favour of devolvement to non-capital cities, then I think it needs to be done."
He hopes to open up the Hunt collection in different ways - through education, by loaning out objects to suitable exhibitions, and by listening to what people want. But he also wants to copperfasten the Museum's international reputation. "I'm negotiating with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London about a major exhibition of Irish delftware made in Dundalk, some of which is in our collection, some in places all round the world."
The Hunt needs more than £250,000 each year, so McGonigal advises people to expect "mendicant letters soon". The museum already has an active force of sponsors and of voluntary workers. Meanwhile, he is anticipating moving into a dower house in Adare this autumn - "I'm bringing my blackamoor fish and the dogs Hector and Hercules, but I'm looking for good homes for my two tomcats, and for my 12 geese," - and is being encouraged by friends to stitch himself into the life of the city. "Mary Coll of Belltable says I must support Shannon - I who went to a rugby-playing school and have spent my life avoiding the game . . ."