I leave my interview with Lynn Scarff wondering how many other people in Ireland can claim that their job includes the responsibility of caretaking millions of pieces of our history.
Scarff is the director of the National Museum of Ireland, and is now seven years into a maximum 10-year term. It’s not unusual to be the boss of a couple of hundred people, but to be also safeguarding four million objects connected with our national heritage is definitely uncommon.
“About 95-96 per cent of what we have is in storage,” she says. “There is a very small percentage of our collection on display.”
The museum’s four branches – Archaeology, in Kildare Street, Decorative Arts & History, at Collins Barracks, and Natural History, in Merrion Street, all in Dublin, and Country Life, at Turlough Park, Co Mayo – can scarcely be described as lacking content.
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To contemplate the vast proportion of its collection that is in storage is to understand a little of how museum curation works. Indeed, as the natural-history branch has closed to facilitate a long-term rebuilding project, the percentage of objects in storage is probably even higher than usual.
Scarff’s own background is in natural history; she studied zoology at Trinity College Dublin. “My first memory of a museum is of the Natural History Museum, of the ‘Dead Zoo’. It’s going in there with my drawing book, and my mum, just spending hours lost in cases, looking at the diversity of everything.”
Her strongest and earliest memory of any museum exhibit is of the giant deer that stood on the ground floor of the Natural History Museum. It is, in a way, Ireland’s native version of a dinosaur, and sure to be imprinted in the memories of any schoolchild who has ever unexpectedly come upon it. “It was the scale of it,” Scarff says, of what struck her most.
Her first few weeks in the job came after the 2018 referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Her challenge was to try to capture a snapshot of significant social history in real time, so that objects around the event could provide some kind of explanation and context for future visitors.
“One of our curators was up and down the country, collecting banners from all over,” she says. “That kind of contemporary collecting, where we are collecting objects that we may not associate value with, is actually about ensuring that we have the material culture that reflects our lived experiences. And then exhibiting it in ways that, when people come into their national museum, they see collections that connect with them.”
Legacy museums, of which the Archaeology Museum, on Kildare Street, is one, carry the challenge of how to remain relevant to audiences into the future.
Others, such as the British Museum, as one perpetually visible example, have to work out how to address their colonial past – many famous objects now on display in London, such as the Benin Bronzes and Elgin Marbles, were looted from their countries of origin during the era of British imperialism.
“That conversation around repatriation has always been ongoing in museums,” Scarff says. “It’s reaching a peak now in some respects. When you look at it globally, it is the case-by-case element that is crucial, because of the complexities. I don’t think there is a universal answer, but there is, and there has to be, an acknowledgment that we hold collections that were stolen. And we” – museum directors and curators – “have to engage with those collections.”
Does the National Museum of Ireland hold any such objects?
“We have what we would call our ‘ethnographic collection’ – which I would say is an antiquated term. We have about 15,000 such objects, and the vast majority of those came to the National Museum when we were part of the British Empire. Some of them came to us via Irish soldiers in the British forces.”
What kind of objects are they? “Clubs. Material from Captain Cook’s voyages. We have a small amount of Benin material. It’s a vast collection. We have a lot of North American material as well. Some African material. A lot of Australasian material.”
It’s only in the past three years that the collection, still referred to as “ethnographic”, was granted a designated curator. “They are in a process of working through that material and documenting it. It’s slow but important work.”
How would Scarff define her own role as director of the museum?
“You have to ensure you are relevant to new audiences, and also protect and conserve our heritage,” she says. “Museum practice changes all the time: I think it has gone through a whole variety of engagement in the last 100 years. Particularly interesting to me is the way we engage with communities, because the way we engage with our visitors has changed. The experience isn’t as didactic. There is now an expectation that there is a conversational element to it.”
No matter where in the world museums are, Scarff says, they are not neutral places. National museums always reflect something of their nationhood at the time.
“The interplay between museums and states is something that fascinates me, and how they are used around messaging and questions of identify. If you look at 1916 and how it was presented in the National Museum in 1966, as opposed to how it was represented in 2016, you learn a lot about the maturity of the State in that time. Museums, by their nature, are engaged in political and social aspects of the happenings of the day.”
Which international museums does Scarff regard as exemplary?
“Of late, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, is incredible. They started from not having a collection. They engaged with communities and built trust, so that people who had objects that had been passed down through families, and that told a story, gave those objects to the state.
“The Rijksmuseum, in the Netherlands, is a really fantastic model in terms of open access and how it’s using its digital platform to get more visitors into its digital space. There’s a lot to learn from what they are doing.”
One of the many elements to be treasured about Ireland’s national museum is the fact that entry is free of charge. Donations are perpetually welcome, of course, but free entry ensures everyone has access to our heritage. It also removes visitors’ feeling of having to do some kind of cultural mini-marathon when they come through the doors. And it enables frequent visiting.
Last year Kildare Street received 505,232 visitors. Collins Barracks had 448,997. Turlough Park had 79,821. The Natural History Museum, which closed partway through the year for its rebuilding work, recorded 291,218. (There is no timeline for when it will reopen, but it is likely to be undergoing work for at least a couple of years.)
Your museum is an extension of your space, your place, your community. That doesn’t happen if there is a fee to get in
“I have a very strong feeling that our national museums should always be free to access,” Scarff says. “I very firmly believe that there are other models around development before you would go to charging people to come in.”
Why?
“It’s vital people can walk into their national museum and see their own heritage without having to pay to do it. Your museum is an extension of your space, your place, your community. That doesn’t happen if there is a fee to get in.”
One of the noticeable trends in museums internationally over the past two decades has been a shift to interactivity. Much of this has been delivered via screens, as technology has created ever more audacious possibilities. In 2025, however, pretty much everyone agrees that we spend far too much time looking at screens in our daily lives, and have become overdependent on them.
Has technology harmed the museum experience?
“Technology can add value to museum experiences, but what started to happen was that it became the offer. There’s nothing that equates to the moment when you stand beside an object and think abut what that object has witnessed. That object is a witness of these periods of time, and that’s incredibly powerful. And then you can use screens and digital and online to provide what I describe as ‘depth on demand’, where you can get further and further into information and detail. But there is nothing as powerful as a room full of objects.”
At base, it is always simply “about the collection”, she says. “Think about how important objects from our own families are through generations: rings, necklaces, books. We all have a deep understanding of that interaction. For different people it’s different objects, but I think we all understand that sense of connection.”
One of Scarff’s favourite objects in the collection is the “nonconformist chair” by the designer and architect Eileen Gray, which is held at Collins Barracks. Later, she emails to say: “Eileen Gray is fascinating to me, an incredibly accomplished woman, designer, maker and entrepreneur who was in many ways ahead of her time. This wonderful nonconformist chair feels like it could have been designed today and reflects the essence of the timeless quality of great design.”
Another favourite she emails about is what’s known as the Mitchelstown Face Cup. This was found in 2004, during excavations to build a new road along what is now the M8 motorway. It is Early Bronze Age, and more than 3,000 years old, and was found along with a couple of other items.
Scarff writes in her message: “One of the cups pictured featured a clearly defined face. This cup is the earliest known depiction of a human face ever discovered in Ireland. Based on the details of the find and the arrangement of the vessels, experts consider that they were potentially placed as a symbolic or ritual deposit.
“This object is certainly not the most beautiful, nor is it the most well-crafted of our expansive collection, but it speaks to a familiar sensation experienced in the museum that is the spine-tingling moment of awe an object evokes, when you pause to reflect on the individual who, more than 3,500 years ago, crafted this cup with a clear intent to represent a human face.”
The National Museum has lately acquired an object that will resonate with a generation of people at Turlough Park, the branch of the museum that celebrates our rural heritage. It hopes to put it on display later in the year.
“It’s a red Honda 50 motorcycle. Everyone that you talk to will have a story about a Honda 50. An uncle using it to go out to get the sheep. It being used to get down to the local dance. It replaced the bicycle. It’s a resonating piece of folk life, one of those objects that help us tell the stories of ourselves.”
A Honda 50 will come to Mayo, and about 17 early-medieval manuscripts written by Irish monks in what is now Switzerland, and never before seen here, are coming on loan from the Abbey Library of St Gall, a Unesco World Heritage site.
These will form part of the Words on the Wave exhibition at Kildare Street, which will also include the Kinale book shrine. The shrine was found by a group of divers in 1986; it was in pieces at the bottom of Lough Kinale, which borders counties Westmeath, Longford and Cavan. This will be the first time the book shrine will be displayed in its entirety. Its restoration may seem to have taken a long time, but when an object dates from around the early ninth century, a few decades of restoration seems very brief in comparison.
Behind the scenes with museum conservators
I am in a bright, large room in a building at Collins Barracks, home to the Decorative Arts and History branch of the National Museum of Ireland.
Everything is white, and the two people I am being introduced to are wearing white coats. It’s a little like a hospital, except this place is not here to mend people: it’s a lab where some of the most precious and fragile objects from our national heritage are sent to be conserved and restored.
Paul Mullarkey and Carol Smith are the two conservators here today, each working on separate objects. There are eight full-time conservators and one part-time. Mullarkey is bent over part of the Shrine of Kinale. It’s a book shrine that a group of divers found, in 1986, at the bottom of Lough Kinale, which borders counties Westmeath, Longford and Cavan.
“It was found dismantled,” Mullarkey explains, indicating where the covers, spine and sides had been. Whatever was in the shrine – archaeologists believe it was a book, as it looks similar to other book shrines found in Ireland – had long since been consumed by lake water.
But the decorated metal of the covers had survived, as had some of the oak holding the piece together. The process of restoration has taken years, as anything made of wood that has spent centuries underwater has to go through many stages of treatment before being able to survive in air.
Conservation is a highly technical process. I’m not sure I understand everything Mullarkey is telling me, but I do know that this object spent more than a millennium sitting in a marshy lake; that any of it has survived is astounding.
The shrine was partly made of oak, with gilded bronze and amber studs. Anyone who has seen the Book of Kells will be familiar with the fantastical Celtic depictions of animals. There are some engravings of similar beasts on the shrine’s cover. Mullarkey points out two beasts with their mouths open. Then he shows me tails. “It’s all the grammar of Irish medieval art,” he says.
The shrine itself was probably at least a century old before it ended up in Lough Kinale. We don’t know why it was placed there. Whatever about depositing gold items in a bog for temporary safekeeping, and hoping to return to reclaim them later, putting something in water doesn’t, to a layman, suggest the motive was to preserve it.
It’s so rare to encounter such an item of our heritage without its protective glass case, as we usually see when we visit our museums. The early Christian book shrine is just lying on a modern white table, next to a mundane multiplug extension. It went into the water at a time when there was no electricity, no cars, no computers, no planes, no phones; nothing of what we now consider the ordinary essentials of our lives. Yet the craftsmanship is timeless: we can recognise the shrine as beautiful in the same way that our ancestors would have. I take a photograph on my phone, and eras collide.
Carol Smith is at another table, working on her own restoration project. It’s a Viking iron sword that was discovered as recently as 2018. It was found in the River Shannon, again by divers, in a stretch close to Limerick. It looks heavy, and as if it could still do damage. Was it ever used to injure anyone? We will never know. It certainly has a visual impact: I don’t think anyone back in the ninth century would have liked seeing that sword approaching their face.
Smith explains that she has worked on loosening and removing pieces of metal that had bubbled up over the sword over the centuries, giving it a kind of second skin of metal. Some pieces take a long time to remove, and some lift off in one bit; that’s my uneducated takeaway from her technical explanation.
Then Smith points to what looks like shining metallic filigree, some kind of golden and silver wire that’s clearly visible across the hilt of the sword. It looks strikingly delicate against the rest of the sword’s jagged iron.
“I only removed the metal that was covering this in the last couple of days,” she says.
I don’t know how many people routinely come and go through this conservation lab each week, but there haven’t been many in the past couple of days.
“You are,” Smith says as I stare at the newly exposed bright filigree of the Viking sword found in a river I have spent a lifetime crossing, “only the sixth person to see this decoration since the Vikings dropped it in.”
