Walk down along the Liffey towards the old Collins Barracks and you'll find your heart begins to lift. The opening of the new galleries of the National Museum down there are heralded by elegant flags. You pass through one of the most eloquent corners of Dublin and go in a gate that has been closed to all but Army men for the last two centuries. You go up the curving path that cavalry and artillery and countless squads of marching men travelled before you. You go under the arch and onto the breathtaking parade-ground where the "100 Paces" mark is still fixed to a granite wall, and across to the handsome new entrance-hall of the museum.
Everything around - granite walls, wood floors, stone flag passageways, slate roofs, colonnades of painted brick - have been marvellously restored and adapted. The aroma of coffee comes from the new cafe.
The ladies in the shop are busily selling postcards of the museum artefacts. The attendant at the reception desk directs visitors here and there. The busy day wears on. Around five, the cleaners get ready to move in to get the place immaculate again for the next day's business. There is every appearance of something planned and purposeful at work here. But it is a sham.
Up in the galleries, it is as if the installation of the exhibitions stopped dead three-quarters of the way through and the museum was suddenly abandoned like the Marie Celeste. An animated tape about Daniel O'Connell is talking to empty walls. The signs that direct you to the Fonthill Vase lead to an empty glass case. Here there's a cabinet with an unexplained piece of lace, there an apparently random trio of things used in the 1798 Rebellion. Expensive lighting highlights objects still in their wrappings. What happened, you ask yourself. What happened?
The answer is well worth bearing in mind the next time someone starts boasting about the Celtic Tiger and all that. What happened is an everyday story of Irish organisational inefficiency, inertia and poor or non-existent planning. In this instance, it is about these qualities in the Civil Service.
But aspects of the tragi-comic story of the museum service apply to almost every Irish state and semi-state body I have ever had any dealings with - parts of the health service and the prison service are just two instances.
In fact, for all the self-congratulatory rhetoric of the people who make a living out of the pseudo-science of management, I often wonder whether management is not, as a discipline, the area in our culture where post-colonial helplessness is most evident.
The museum service - I hope I've got this tangled story correct - is supposedly on its way out of the Civil Service. The National Museum is supposed to become, when and if a ministerial order is made, a non-commercial state body, thrusting confidently into the future where heritage is big business etcetera etcetera.
In the meantime, the professional/technical staff of the museum service come under Arts, Heritage, the Gaeltacht and the Islands and students of public administration should flock to study it there before it is too late. They will find a perfect example of an unreformed 1928 management structure which has continued to function only through the exercise of considerable bureaucratic ingenuity.
Since cutting down on staff over the last quarter of a century or so has been the only visible Government policy towards the museum service, posts - as they arose - were embargoed or suppressed. There have been no promotions for almost 20 years. Until recently, there was no new member of staff for 15 years. Meantime, the work of the service continued to expand and in recent years almost to explode.
Since there couldn't have been a museum service at all if the spirit as well as the letter of public service embargoes had been observed, the existing staff inhabit a wonderland of posts in which they are "acting", or "on secondment", or "on loan", or permanently, temporarily something or other. This worked, in a way, as long as nothing at all happened.
But Michael D. Higgins happened. And European money happened. And the decision to refurbish Collins Barracks for part of the museum's collections happened. There are wonderful new exhibition spaces but they are to be curated by a staff, 60 per cent of whom are "acting" in higher grades without promotion. They get the same money every week as if they had been promoted but since they haven't been promoted, they don't get equivalent pension rights.
Money, however, is not the reason the technical/professional staff are making a mockery of their own beloved exhibitions. It may be that the Department of Finance, for fear of a knock-on effect in other decayed parts of the public service, is refusing to concede the point on pensions: if so they should say so, so that we can be quite clear that Charlie McCreevy is running - or in this case, not running - the museum service.
Though money may be preventing a settlement with the staff, what they want is for someone in charge to recognise that the staffing of the museum is in real crisis and to do something about it - preferably something planned.
But there isn't much hope. At present, there is no management position on staffing. Indeed, there is no identifiable management.
How could civil servants - most of whom have experience only in clerical work connected with the Gaeltachts - be expected to know how to manage a contemporary National Museum which post-Higgins includes four Dublin institutions, a proposed new institution in, of all places, Castlebar and a national register of heritage objects? To name but a few of the projects Michael D. left behind. How can a Civil Service almost primevally ignorant of industrial relations cope with the industrial relations problems that radical change invariably generates?
The professional/technical staff blacked the opening of the beautiful new galleries in the wild hope of getting enough publicity to force someone to rescue them from their organisational black hole. There have been umpteen studies of their staffing position, including one - this may be a joke - carried out by the Department of Finance, which was never finalised because of shortage of staff in the Department of Finance. But after all the studies, some one still has to take charge and propose a plan which is capable of being delivered. I can quite understand that it mightn't be worth it to a senior civil servant to try to do this.
Yet, everyone involved can't evade responsibility. This is an issue of national pride. Someone is going to have to act.
Are we going to go on with a museum which has no professional staff? We're hardly going to treat the £30 million investment in Collins Barracks as a mere exercise in building and restoration skills!