A vocation in history

INSIDE STORY: She’s a name synonymous with the Cavan County Museum but curator SAVINA DONOHOE is passionate about history and about Cavan. She has led an interesting life, previously as a nun, and now at the helm of the museum, which in recent years has attracted international attention due to the Trench Experience and more recently a Rising replica of the GPO. SEAMUS ENRIGHT caught up with her.

She skips down the ornate polished wood central staircase, boundless enthusiasm buoyed by the day’s earlier events and the opportunity now to personally show another new face around the historical deckings of the Cavan County Museum.
“We’d love to have more here, but I’m sure that’s what every museum in the country says,” Savina opines as we begin to walk and talk, leaving the grandiose surrounds of the former St Clare’s convent lobby and for the expansive back gardens. “We’re a fully accredited museum, which is a big thing, and we continue to work with the National Museum on trying to get items of interest on loan or even returned to the county.
She vents: “It is frustrating to know, and I’m sure the people in the National Museum are frustrated too, that when an item often does go back, it often ends up back in a box and stored away because there obviously isn’t enough room on museum floor for everything. It’s unfortunate. Of course it’d be lovely to put everything on show for the public,” she says, remembering vividly returning the 'Virginia Brooch’, briefly on loan to the Cavan museum during the Virginia 400-year celebrations.
It, like many other precious artefacts, the tri-face carved stone Corleck Head, of which there is a replica in Cavan, or the Breac Maedoc (St Mogue’s Shrine) remain in the custody of the National Museum. However, much remains right here with the Cavan museum in Ballyjamesduff, its collection ranging from prehistoric to modern objects including the Killycluggin Stone, the Lavey Sheela na gig, costumes in the Pighouse Collection and GAA paraphernalia.
One item, bog butter, an example discovered in Clonbrony, Co Longford, is similar to another that Savina entrusted into the care of the National Museum earlier that day after its discovery at a nearby bog last week. Savina’s exuberance for the find matches her passion for almost everything, not just historical, but about Cavan itself.
With a self-depreciating wave of the hand, she regards her title as 'curator’, a role she held since 2009 on an acting basis before being appointed permanently to the position two years ago, as perhaps just in name only.
“I don’t know what I am! I just try keep things going as best I can,” Savina chuckles. “I love Cavan, I love making Cavan a better place, I’m genuinely very passionate about that. History, the arts, culture, Cavan to me is a great county.
“We’re blessed in this county and I believe places like the museum are a wonderful place for visitors to come and meet the county for the first time and learn its history. I feel it important to get an understanding of a place, of where it has come from, because it does makes up our present.”

A 'mad’ idea
In recent years Savina and her team have raised the museum’s profile exponentially, gaining international attention following the addition of a World War I trench experience in 2014, and more recently, a walk-through replica GPO façade to commemorate the 1916 Rising.
She readily admits the GPO idea, the combination of two 40ft containers and a 20ft container, at the start was considered a “mad one”.
“But we made it work,” she says, conscious that if plans in the nation’s capital to renovate Dublin’s Moore Street had gone ahead as planned, the only realistic example of the historic battle site might today be located in the grounds of the Ballyjamesduff museum.
With the help of designer Jim Clery and ATB Signs in Virginia, Savina divulges that the secret to teaching people about history is to do it without them actually realising it.
“That’s the trick. It’s something you learn as you go along, especially in the museum game. I’m 18 years here now and I’ve learned so much in that time. People want to feel welcome and they don’t want to feel overwhelmed. It’s important that history is accessible.
“I’ll be the first to admit I’m not an historian. A lot of people presume I am, or maybe think I should be. But I work with a great many wonderful people, Michael Finnegan for one. People go above and beyond to make history happen for others.
“Overload! That’s the one thing people are inclined to do with history. But less can be more. It’s like the old saying- 'I’ll write you a long letter, but if I had more time I’d write you a shorter one’. We always want to tell the story, not too in-depth, but enough to give people a flavour, to get them interested and maybe they can do some research themselves,” Savina tells the Celt.
The GPO experience means people can walk through the GPO, by timeline, following the footsteps of the rebels as they retreated through a photography studio, into a tenement sitting room, and then a looted shop.
The ending is a fitting tribute to all those executed for their part in the revolution, with recognition given at the entrance to a garden of reflection to Cavan’s own Francis Sheehy Skeffington, the activist and pacifist murdered by British soldiers following the Rising.
Our path takes us then into the PEACE III-funded trench experience, the brainchild of Cavan Council’s Paddy Connaughton, and the largest example of its kind this side of the Channel, which separates England and France.
Before we do, however, Savina reads a quote from Anne Frank, one of the many printed on standing boards dotted around the garden space. 'Our lives are fashioned by our choices. First we make our choices. Then our choices make us.’

Answering the call
It’s an endearing sentiment that Savina, a native of Kilnaleck, has taken to heart, as she later opens up about her past life. She spent five years in vocation with a French Order of nuns by the name of 'Mary Help of Christians’.
With a dawning sense of irony, having worked in the former Ballyjamesduff Convent as a teenager, and now working again as a curator of a museum, she explains that during the bank strikes of the late 1970s, she left her job with the financials to answer 'the calling’ to become a nun and serve god.
“I stuck at it for five years. I left it obviously and I’m not a bit bitter about it. I have no bad feelings. I wanted to try it, it didn’t work out for me and I left. It’s as simple as that,” says the now mother-of-four - son John and three daughters Ciara, Maria and Michelle.
Working with the young girls who went to Dublin for employment but had no place to stay, she says: “I know there is a lot of things going on in the Church now, which I’m very saddened by, but it wasn’t like that for me. As an Order we worked hard in Dublin, and France. I had always wanted to be a nun. It was when I was in Dublin myself and I stayed with them that I decided upon it. They did a lot of inner city work, that kind of thing. To me it served a good purpose.”
Leaving the relative sheltered safety of the convent with no possessions of her own, Savina was warmly welcomed back into the loving and protective fold of her family in Cavan.
“It was a very difficult time in my life. My mother and father were great. They took me back with open arms. But it was hard, when you’re 23 and you haven’t been out and about and have lived the religious life. You have to re-learn the world in many ways.”

A new chapter
After she married, Savina worked at the local school as a secretary before securing a job with the county council and the museum 18 years ago. “I love it, I really love it. I know what it’s like not to work or have anything, so I’m thankful too,” she comments.
Humbly Savina again swats away attempts to reference the lashings of praise heaped upon her and her team due to their tremendous work effort, ethos and enthusiasm over the past number of years.
“We care a lot. I’m very passionate about what I do and I care about people. I care about people who visit the museum and the kids and the questions they might have. For me I care that they leave with something more than they came with and they’ve enjoyed their experience. That they don’t think 'Oh the museum, that’s a boring auld place where boring auld people work’.”
Delighted when she sees a child’s eyes light up as their attention is grasped by something within the museum, she says: “That’s when you know you’ve hooked them. There are so many people who use the museum, older citizens too who see things from their past and they can be very moved by that. It’s an emotional place our museum, and I say our because it belongs to each and every one of us. It’s good we don’t forget the past, what people have sacrificed for us to have what we have now,” adds Savina.