Carlow County Museum is among the best in Ireland, after receiving prestigious new accreditation.
The local museum is one of just 11 nationwide to be awarded ‘Interim Accreditation Standard’ by the Heritage Council.
The awards were presented in a virtual ceremony yesterday after the usual proceedings in Kilkenny Castle were scrapped this year due to Covid restrictions.
Dermot Mulligan, the museum’s curator, has been telling KCLR News “It’s a very good day for the museum in Carlow, this is a programme that has been going on for the past 21 years from the Heritage Council and this is to ensure that museums, whether they’re national institutions like our national museum or national gallery or local authority run museums or community / voluntary museums, anywhere along the country, that they’re all operating to the same standard of museum care, conservation and governance”.
He adds “For us in the museum, we were achieving or exceeding the standard but we probably didn’t have an actual policy or a statement or a strategy to back it up so that’s what we would have spent the last number of years doing, so we would have to put together a strategic plan for the next five years, built upon annual action plans, we would have to set out in quite detail in how much and how we catalogue or collection, the type of items we collect, the type of items we don’t collect”.
While the Museum only received national accreditation yesterday, they’ve always had ‘Designated’ status from the local authority as Mr Mulligan outlines “We’re a designated museum and this is under the national monuments legislation where we are allowed to collect and display archaeological finds from County Carlow and right across the country there are 12 local authority museums and all 12 of us are designated by the national museum to do that so it’s a special designation for us and it’s enshrined in law and it shows we are certainly achieving if not at the gold standard for museum operations across Ireland”.
