Táim ar aon aigne leis an Seanadóir Ó Buachalla. Séard a bhí beartaithe agamsa i dtaobh rud amhain adúirt an Seanadóir go mbeadh an musaem so i mBaile Átha Cliath in ionad bheith i nGaillimh ach do bheadh sé fuirist an cheist sin do réiteach ar ball.
This is a very desirable Bill. The Principal Act was good enough at the time. Some difficulties have been found in connection with it. The real difficulty is not so much the administration of any Act of this kind but the purposes with which the Commissioners of Public Works will be animated. They have done a great deal of good work. In view of the amount of money which would be available for this purpose, the Minister was, of course, absolutely right when he said that we cannot preserve all our ancient monuments as we would like. May I say on this point in relation to what Senator Ó Buachalla said, when concluding, that this matter of the preservation of ancient monuments is not only a question of sentiment? People who have no care for the past can have very little hope for the future.
We should endeavour to preserve all our past without making a choice merely of things that are Gaelic. We should preserve the beautiful objects of any of the peoples who came here whether as invaders or otherwise. A choice must be made as the Minister said and it is not always easy to make that choice. The Principal Act and the Bill itself provide that the choice should be made by the people who can give the best opinion on the matter.
It seems to me that this whole question is one of arousing interest and that interest should be aroused by teaching as far as possible local history in the schools. The people who lived in this country and who never heard of constitutions, laws, parliaments or republics for the matter of that were very patriotic but their patriotism was of a different nature from the fashionable patriotism of the moment. They lived and loved their own districts, not their own counties. They knew the name of every field, hill, stream and cliff in their own area. The decay of the Irish language has meant the decay of that knowledge has lead to a diminution of love of the land. The money spent on matters of this kind would not be wasted. It would have the effect of improving national morale and possibly would have important economic effects as well.
I should like to make a special plea for one particular scheme associated with a particular building. The Royal Hospital at Kilmainham is the very best 17th century building in this island. I happen to have some knowledge of it because as far back as 1923 a proposal was made to move the Oireachtas to the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. At that time, therefore, I had to make considerable acquaintance with the building and I learned that it was a very beautiful building and I got to like it both inside and outside.
At the moment, I understand that there is dry rot in the roof. I do not know precisely what expenditure we will require to make that right but I would like to suggest to the Minister that since it is actually Government property and the land surrounding it is also State property it would be a great shame if this building were allowed to fall into decay. I should like to make a proposal similar to that made by Senator Ó Buachalla. It is a great reflection on us that we have nowhere in this country an open-air folk museum. Indeed, I should have said a folk museum because when properly run and managed one may not only require a considerable space outdoor but also buildings for the exhibits which must necessarily be indoor. The suggestion I was going to make was that if the Royal Hospital were restored it could be used to house folk material. It is a very beautiful building. You would also have available about 40 acres for the display of everything connected with the life of Irish country people.
As Senator Ó Buachalla has said, there are museums of this kind in Sweden. The one in Stockholm attracts 1,000,000 visitors a year, and therefore, it must have a considerable income because a charge is made for entry. I would propose also that there should be a charge for entry here. There is a fine folk museum in Holland. There is also a folk museum in Wales, in Cardiff in a building donated by a nobleman there. A folk museum is planned for Edinburgh and also for Belfast so that it might happen in this country that if you want to know how the Irish countryman lived, what tools he worked with, what kind of a bed he slept in or what kind of a house he lived in, you would have to go to Belfast instead of Dublin or Galway to find out. The position here is that this particular building, the Royal Hospital—when I was a youngster it was called the Old Men's House—has a wonderful situation. It is actually within the City of Dublin. It has splendid views and there is plenty of land attached to it, so that nothing at all would have to be done from the point of view of purchasing either a building or ground.
Immense changes have taken place in this country in my lifetime. I am constantly in touch with very young people, and I find that things that were quite common to me, a person born and reared in Dublin, are now quite unknown to them. I found lately, for instance, that out of 22 people only one had ever seen an earthen floor. The Irish language should certainly be used for the purpose of showing people what Irish country people were like. It is essential that that should be done through the language. There is a new generation growing up, some of them who never saw the inside of a thatched house, who never saw a forge and who think that the shoemaker is a person who stands up with rivets in his mouth and hammers them into a shoe on an iron last. They do not know the meaning of the word gréasaí in Irish or shoemaker in English at all. They have never seen a man making a shoe. That applies to the ordinary trades and crafts, apart from basket-making and boat-making which might be regarded as important but perhaps unusual.
In this country we have records of the history of Irish chieftains, of Gaelic aristocrats as well as a good deal of history about Anglo-Irish nobles and English Queens and Lords Lieutenant, but almost nothing at all about the Irish countrymen who bore the brunt of all our history and who, up to the 19th century, fought all our battles. It is quite clear that whatever happens the Irish language, Irish folk life is bound to go.
No one wants to stop people getting better houses or from using machinery instead of hand crafts, but the State certainly should do everything that possibly can be done to preserve a picture of what Irish life was like a 100 or even 50 years ago. The changes during the last 30 or 40 years have been at an extraordinarily fast rate, so that before it is too late I think exhibits should be collected and set out in an appropriate place.
The place that I suggest is the Royal Hospital with local museums in other places. If you had something of that kind it would prove very attractive to our own people because they cannot love their country unless they know something about it, and the most important part of it I think was life in rural areas. It would also, I think, prove attractive to tourists because what tourists like most when travelling is to see what is most native and most peculiar to the particular country they are visiting. It would be possible to set all that out in an attractive manner and to get a considerable sum of money from visitors if we were able to show them all those things which were so characteristic of the life of the country and which are now disappearing—the work of various people like blacksmiths, wheelwrights, basket-makers, saddlers, coopers, sieve-makers with a general collection of their tools and implements.
During the war, for example, people discovered that a sleán was used for cutting turf, but how many knew that the word had 20 or 30 different meanings—that there were different sleáns in different areas. The same thing applies to turf ricks, hay ricks and to houses. Anyone travelling northwards will notice the change in the style of houses when he crosses the Boyne. One of the advantages of the proposal which I should like the Minister to consider carefully is that if you had a building like the Royal Hospital you could put into it domestic features such as a kitchen, a dairy and bedrooms. That would obviate the necessity of building an outdoor erection. I think it could become a centre of folk life and of research with prints and pictures of country life. All that would provide a picture of what the country was like 100 years ago. A great deal of that is disappearing daily before our eyes. I think that before it passes we should make a determined effort to see that we preserve it for future generations. Not only would it be good from the national point of view, but it would be a duty fulfilled, and we would reap economic advantages from it as well.
I have here a handbook of the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff and it defines pretty well what a folk museum is. I might read two sentences from it:—
"A folk museum represents the life and culture of a nation, illustrating the arts and crafts, and in particular the building crafts, of the complete community, and including in its illustration the activities of the mind and spirit—ceremonial, drama, dance and music—as well as of the hand. Such museums are in two parts: a building for the systematic display of the materials of life and culture, where the research student can study the details of folk life in exhibits emphasising the evolution and distribution of types, their chronology and many other problems. The environment of the national life is presented in the open-air section."
This is something which concerns by no means research students only. Here we have folk life and folklore which are of very great interest to continental scholars and students. Apart from this altogether, it would be a wonderful thing for our young people to be able to see how the Irish countryman lived and worked. The Minister will have accomplished a great deal in his time if he can do two things. One of them is the preservation of a very beautiful 17th century building—though by the way, the site has historic associations going back to early times—and Bully's Acre, a burial ground where it was thought for a time that Robert Emmet's body rested. It has an historic association that would capture people's imagination and if it could be preserved, it would have not only an effect upon ourselves but would be money well spent—money which might bring in an unexpected return.