Curator of Country Life —6 August 1934–23 September 2021
John O’Sullivan, who died aged 87 from Covid-19 on 23 September 2021, will long be remembered as one of the great servants of the National Museum of Ireland, where he was the senior curator of the Folklife section of the then Irish Antiquities Division.
The folklife collection had been established from the 1930s to show the antiquity and continuity of indigenous craft traditions and to explain how archaeological artefacts might have been used. Thecollection also gradually came to acquire more mass-produced bygones, which it was hoped would someday make their way into a national folklife museum along the lines of those pioneered in Scandinavia, Wales and Cultra, Co. Down. John worked under A.T. Lucas, who had been responsible for this area ofantiquities up to his appointment as Director of the NMI in 1954.
Apart from collecting and recording different craftsmen, John classified 330 St Bridget’s crosses andalso published on sheep cribs, slanes and iron-shod spades (a distant ancestor of which was later to turn upin Viking Dublin). He was the first to describe hair hurling balls and the tools and products of the tinsmith.
At Lucas’s behest, John supervised the shooting of 30 films of traditional crafts by Brendan Doyle, the Museum photographer. These included the building of a currach on Aran and, most famously, a rye straw-stuffed horse-collar at a harness-maker’s in Ballinasloe in early November 1969. So interested did the newly TV-obsessed public become in the ‘whirring’ of the camera and the whole operation, including John’s ‘whispered directions’, that a large crowd gathered, causing a minor traffic jam! Other, hopefully less-dramatic events dealt with the work of thatchers, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, makers of straw mats, súgán chairs and straw (hens’) nests.
John’s empathy with native crafts and the people who practised them stemmed from his upbringing at Fossa (where he attended the local national school) and Killarney (where he attended St Brendan’s seminary), after which he moved to work for Dublin Corporation. He took night classes at Trinity (BA, BComm.), which led him to the National Museum in 1962. He took archaeology classes at UCD. His gifts should have been better utilised in an institution to which he gave so much. He should have been appointed to lead Folklife to the destination he had planned for it instead of being sidelined to a research keepership from which he departed early in 1986, largely owing to this setback in his career.
John was an established curator by late 1971 when I joined the Museum as a young archaeologist,sharing an office with Michael Ryan (later Director of the Chester Beatty Library) and himself. No one wasmore welcoming than John. His enthusiasm for the recording and publication of items in the collection and for the milieux from which they originated was inspirational. It didn’t hurt that he and I had come from athen rapidly dying traditional world of rural craft. I was fortunate to see the care he took with accurately recording his fieldwork and his labelling of black-and-white and colour images that he had taken. He advised me on photography and set me on my first weekend with a Yashica to Waterford. He also advised me before surveying a sweathouse at Dolla, Nenagh, on my first solo fieldwork sortie in 1972. His devotion to the collection and to his network of contacts around the country was impressive. His attention extendedto his old VW Beetle, which he was so reluctant to give up that he had to drive it to the dump! His care for items in his own world extended to his advising me to acquire a Crombie overcoat, which I duly did. Healso got me to boil a kettle for the first time at the National Museum, Kildare St, tea club!
A major part of his legacy was his constant representation of the professional and technical staff in aninstitution which did not then have its own personnel department, such matters being dealt with off-site inan often-unsympathetic parent department. John was frequently the only port of call for sometimes unfairly penalised colleagues for whom, as long-time secretary of the staff association, he would make a case toofficials with long memories. He came to be regarded by them as a troublemaker when in fact he was achampion of the victims of poor management.
His and his friend John Teahan’s vision for a decentralised museum as set out in their pioneering publication Fóntas in 1973 wasn’t shared by all his colleagues. It did, however, start a debate that culminated in the opening of the Country Life branch of the National Museum at Castlebar in 2001 and,less directly, to the establishment of local authority-run county museums. Fóntas found support atMuckross House, where John befriended manager and publicist Ned Myers and engaged in the pioneering folklife publication Ros and where he was able to give advice in his retirement.
A genial colleague and a great influence, John more than anyone knew the value of the Irish FolklifeCollection. No one described it or photographed it better. It was always a pleasure to meet him, his smiling disposition covering the disappointment of official mistreatment.
One hopes that the collections that he recorded and believed in will continue to attract the maximumscholarly and official attention because of what they have to teach the new Ireland. Sincere sympathy to his wife Mary and to the wider O’Sullivan and Canny families.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis.
Pat Wallace