PRESIDENT MARY McAleese begins a three-day state visit to Denmark today, focusing on boosting trade and tourism ties.
The president will see renewable energy facilities in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, meet members of the Irish community and revisit Ireland’s Viking ties to Denmark. This evening, Mrs McAleese will be guest of honour at a dinner hosted by Denmark’s popular monarch, Queen Margrethe II.
At the end of her visit, the president will open Tourism Ireland’s new Nordic headquarters in Copenhagen.
Mrs McAleese’s visit comes 40 years after an important visit – in the other direction – of six Nordic designers, including three Danes, to examine Ireland’s burgeoning design industry.
Invited to Ireland by Córas Tráchtála, the then Irish Export Board, the 1961 report, Design in Ireland, is an important snapshot of a modernising Ireland and poignant record of missed chances and vanished traditions.
“That report was very important, it formed the basis of Kilkenny Design and the design faculty of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD),” said Dr Gearóid Ó Conchubhair, head of a National College of Art and Design research group. “The report was the beginning of an improving situation for design in Ireland even if Kilkenny ultimately became a victim of our last recession in the 1980s.”
With the utmost of discretion, the visitors highlight on their report’s first page why design is unlikely to achieve Nordic levels of success: the low priority of art in Irish schools and Ireland’s “distinct leaning towards literature, theatre, the spoken word”.
Rather than copy Scandinavian design, the visitors urged Ireland to follow the Nordic example of building on traditional crafts for modern needs.
“The best-designed products we found in Ireland were those based on traditional craft industries successfully interpreting the Irish tradition,” noted the authors.
On Irish linen they said: “The quality still seems to be the very best”; Donegal tweeds “probably the most valuable and brilliant facet of Ireland’s textile industry. We have nothing but praise . . .”
But it wasn’t all praise – the designers despaired over “haphazard” ceramics and “plagiarised” furniture. But overall they saw much good work upon which to build. Their recommendations included a design awareness publicity campaign as well as the foundation of a design academy.
The intervening decades marked a rise and fall in Irish design with Kilkenny and Waterford Crystal, while Danish design moved on, with an industry of 4,500 companies and an annual turnover of nearly €6 billion.
Today, in a nod to the 1960s visitors, the NCAD has invited leading Danish designer Hans Thyge Raunkjaer to lecture and exhibit his work at the college next year.
Mr Raunkjaer attributes Denmark’s successful design culture to strong visual and materials traditions, but he says vital support for the industry came from postwar governments. They lead by example by building public spaces and schools to the highest standards, he says, and filling them with the best Danish-designed furniture and fittings.
“We had very idealistic thinking after the war within the different governments that when we spend money in public we should do it well,” he says. “Our society has been teaching people to use design for decades.” What Ireland lacks in design and materials production, the designer says, it can make up now in research and design, such as in the field of ergonomics.
“As a designer I haven’t the time to do heavy research and the NCAD is doing important research into ergonomics that no schools are doing here,” says Mr Raunkjaer.
NCAD director Prof Declan McGonagle acknowledges that much has been lost in Ireland since the 1961 design report.
“We are very slow in Ireland as a society to value the visual because our literary culture is so strong,” he says. But with partnerships with the Danes and others, he still sees opportunities for the country to become a player in product design. “There’s been a shift away from design driven by aesthetics to the ‘use value of design’ and we have a constituency of young designers here who are picking up on that.”