For Joyce, history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. For the large crowd at the opening of the Museum of Literature Ireland on Culture Night, the literary past of Ireland is clearly precious.
Standing over St Stephen’s Green in Newman House, which was formerly home to University College Dublin (UCD) where Joyce attended university, lies a brand-new jewel of Irish cultural life. This project has been in development for over nine years and is the product of a collaboration between UCD and the National Library of Ireland.
By the time I arrive at the museum at 7pm, over 700 people have already passed through the museum’s door and the atmosphere is electric. Before I wander the storied halls of Newman House I get a chance to speak with Mark O’Neill, the Head of Operations at the museum. Like everyone else I meet that night, O’Neill’s passion for this project is evident.
Speaking to The University Times, O’Neill describes his favourite part of the museum: “Our Learning Room, which isn’t an exhibition piece, is an essential part of what we want to achieve here. We’ll be doing free workshops for primary schools every day that utilise the whole site. As well as the workshops, there’s a bursary for Transition Year aspiring writers.”
After talking to O’Neill, I wander through the old Georgian house and discover, with much excitement, that although the museum is housed in an antique building, the world created within it is by no means antiquated. The landscape of the museum is a woven tapestry of the past and the future of Irish literature, with modern designs and stylistic choices that gently merge the old and the new in a mesmerising way.
One room contains an old table and chairs, set so they look like they belong to a historical scene, while in the next there’s a giant, minimalistic map of Dublin, which retraces the path of Dublin’s Odysseus, Leopold Bloom. This juxtaposition should clash, but instead it highlights the intimacy of past, present and future in the creative world.
One of the night’s attendees is Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Josepha Madigan. Speaking to The University Times, Madigan states: “I think this is a world-class museum and it’s wonderful to see art and literature acknowledged in this way. We haven’t had a dedicated museum of Irish literature before and now we have, and I think it’s going to be difficult to keep droves of people away from a place like this.”
I ask the Minister if she would like to see more cultural spaces and events open in the city and across the country. She responds: “I’d love to see more culture nights throughout the year, I think we can do perhaps smaller versions of Culture Night, and we’re always looking for more cultural spaces and artistic spaces, we’re looking at pilot projects, we’re looking at nightlife in particular and being able to utilise the space that national and cultural institutions have to offer.”
The final leg of my journey takes me to the original copy of Ulysses. This amazing piece holds obvious cultural significance for our city and our literary canon. The ceiling of the room is littered with notes of drafts of Ulysses, chaotically spread above the finished masterpiece.
The fantastic Learning Room on the top floor is created, like every other space in the museum, in the spirit of inclusivity and accessibility. It sums up the spirit of what this beautiful cultural space is about: celebrating our incredible literary past and forging a dynamic literary future.
