Donegal’s Judith McCarthy is longest serving museum curator in Ireland

by Paddy Walsh

FOR someone who is directly involved in history, Judith McCarthy has made a little piece of it herself!

After arriving in Letterkenny thirty years ago, she is currently the longest serving Local Authority Museum Curator in Ireland.

“It sometimes seems like yesterday and other times a long time ago. But I’ve loved every moment of it,” she said.

This interview focuses on the curator but Judith is quick to stress that the running of the Donegal County Museum, under the umbrella of Donegal County Council, is a team effort.

“Without Assistant Curator, Caroline Carr, doing the research and liasing with all the groups, we wouldn’t have the exhibitions. And when people who come into the museum, their first contact is with receptionist and clerical officer Jacqueline Abbas who is a powerhouse there and is great at engaging with the people who call in.

“The small but dedicated team also work with the larger culture organisations, involved with Donegal County Council including the Arts Service, the Archives department, Library and Heritage office.”

Judith’s own history goes back to early years in England before her family relocated to Ireland.

“My dad was English and my mum was from Wexford and we moved to Cootehill, County Cavan when I was eight.”

She attended school there and went on to study history in Trinity College before spending a year undertaking a Diploma in Arts Administration in U.C.D.

There were also no museum courses in Ireland at the time.

Judith went on to do a placement in the National Museum in Dublin and then worked at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris for three months.

She also undertook voluntary work in Dublin including a stint in the Chester Beatty Library in the city.

But then a job advertisement came up for the post of Curator at the Donegal County Museum in Letterkenny.

“I’m not too sure where I saw the advertisement – it may have been my mother sent it to me but in any case I applied.”

She recalls doing the interview in the old Urban District Council offices behind the swimming pool and was subsequently offered the job, taking up the post on July 4th, 1994.

Her only previous experiences of the county came when she attended the Gaeltacht and also travelled to Letterkenny for the then hugely popular International Folk Festival.

“I came up with some friends and we pitched a tent somewhere on the outskirts of the town as far as I remember. It was a brilliant festival.

“But that and my time in the Gaeltacht were my only two experiences of Donegal up to then.”

Until she arrived lock, stock and barrel to her new home and new job.

The Donegal County Museum began life in the old Workhouse building and when Judith arrived she initially worked alongside Joanna Nolan who acted as the equivalent of Assistant Curator, and Mervyn White, the Museum Technician.

Mervyn also looked after the building and it was he who alerted Judith to what would become her first significant project at the Museum.

“He came to me one day and said he had seen something on the skirting board upstairs.

“The something turned out to be dry rot and unfortunately wasn’t just confined to the skirting board.

“We got someone to look at it and it was discovered it had spread everywhere.”

Consequently the museum was closed for a period.

“We had a beautiful old staircase that had been to be taken out because it was just riddled with it. It was sad that it had to be done – sad but necessary.”

Eventually the Museum reopened in 1999.

Exhibitions with which she has been particularly pleased about centre on the First World War.

Irish men from both sides of the border fought and died on the battlefields of the Somme and Paschendale and elsewhere but for a long time, there was little reference to that aspect of it on the Irish school curriculum.

That has all changed with credit due to the likes of the late T.D., Paddy Harte, and the Donegal County Museum that has hosted exhibitions dealing with the subject.

“I’m very pleased with the progress we have made in this regard. We staged our first exhibition on it back in 2001. Initially it was very difficult to get people with connections with the First World War to come in and talk about it or share their stories or indeed lend us anything.

“But when we hosted another First World War exhibition in 2014, it was much easier for people to come along and share those stories and lend us exhibits for it.”

The Museum has also reprinted a fifth edition of the Donegal Book of Honour which details those who perished in the war between 1914-1918.

“I have personal connections with the First World War in that I had two grand-uncles killed in it – one on my dad’s side and one on my mum’s side.”

“It was a forgotten history for so long but we’ve done a lot of work to address that,’ Judith declares.

When she eventually retires from the post – not for some time yet! – she hopes to do further research into the lives of those soldiers who returned from the war and ended up in St. Conal’s Hospital and the Workhouse building in Letterkenny.

Ask her about other exhibitions that have stood out in her thirty years and she’ll tell you that St. Conal’s features as one of them.

The exhibition, entitled ‘Behind the Walls” focused on those who were housed in the vast building and those who worked there.

“We built a cell in the gallery depicting what it would have been like back in the days when it was known as the Donegal Lunatic Asylum. And we had on the walls faces of some of the people who were there though we didn’t name them.”

A truly moving exhibition that grabbed the general public’s attention.

And not the only one that had hoards streaming through the doors of the County Museum.

“One of the most incredible exhibitions we had was, of course, the Tullydonnell gold rings.

“The gold hoard, dating from the Bronze Age (1200 to 800 B.C.) was discovered by chance in June 2018 when local farmers were engaged in improving drainage at the base of a field at Tullydonnell Lower in the east of the county. They came upon a small pit covered by a boulder in which there lay four solid gold overlapping rings.

“The thing about it was that I wasn’t even in the country at the time. My husband and two daughters and I hadn’t been on holidays for some years and we picked that week to go off to Majorca! It was Caroline who rang me to tell me ‘you’re not going to believe this…!”

“There was a huge amount of work behind the scenes in getting them to that stage with consideration having to be taken into issues like security and environmental conditions.

“During the two weeks we had them on display we had 3,000 visitors through the doors including a thousand school kids.

“It was great to have the gold rings here for that fortnight to be on display in the county they were found in.”

And if you didn’t get the chance to see them there they are currently on view at the National Museum in Dublin.

“I suppose there was a sense of relief when they did go. We had 24 hour security around the building at the time and I slept with one eye open every night,” Judith smiles.”

Later this year, the County Museum will host an exhibition on ‘Women In History’ in conjunction with County Archivist, Niamh Brennan.

And next year, an exhibition will focus on the links between Donegal and Scotland.

Had she not come to Letterkenny she would likely never have met the man who was to become her husband. A native of County Mayo, Michael Kelly, was an immediate neighbour of Judith in Letterkenny when they met!

“We have been married 25 years this year and have two daughters, Ciana and Lara.”

Judith’s own view of history is a simple one.

“It’s not just about the Stone Age or the Civil War. It’s about where you come from.”

And in the past thirty years, she has come a long way.

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