Unique Waterford museum get major funding for 'cutting-edge' extension
The Museum of Time in Waterford has been awarded €15,000 in funding
The Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media has announced a series of small grants for local and regional museums around the country.
Projects funded under this scheme seek to enhance the cultural offering of museums, to encourage greater access to museums and to promote the use of museums as tourism resources in their locality or region.
€15,000 in funding has been allocated to the Irish Museum of Time in Greyfriars Church, Waterford City, Ireland's only Horological Museum featuring some of the oldest Irish longcase, table clocks and watches in the world.
The funding will go towards an extension of the museum into the adjacent Central Hall, to house a cutting-edge interactive presentation of the story of timekeeping through the millennia, identified as lacking in the existing museum.
It will also fund an AI hologram & new exhibits including 'Waterford Time'; 4 or 6 Waterford-made timepieces, recently acquired from fundraising; and 'Cuckoo Time'; the twenty best cuckoo clocks in the world.
Total funding of €171,850 is being made available under the Regional Museum Exhibitions Scheme 2024.
Speaking at the launch of the funding on Friday, August 23, Minister Martin hailed Ireland's local and regional museums as "an extremely important resource for accessing culture and heritage in towns and villages across the country.
"They provide a sense of community and place by celebrating a collective heritage and offer a great way to learn about the history of the local area.
“My Department’s work over the years in funding projects under this scheme has allowed cultural bodies to continue to enhance the presentation of their exhibitions and improve the cultural offering to the communities they serve.
"Our local and regional museums collect, preserve and store objects and materials of religious, cultural and historical value while providing a source of entertainment and wonder. These museums help to preserve and promote our cultural heritage and without them, a lot of our history and culture would have been lost over the years," she concluded.
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