LAST week the National Museum of the Royal Navy announced its intention to reopen all its museum sites in August with the exception of HMS Caroline in Belfast.
This is because the Department for the Economy decided to close HMS Caroline until December to undertake some form of study into future options for operating the ship - a decision the National Museum would not have contemplated.
NMRN generates 81 per cent of its revenues through ticket sales and commercial activity. We rely on a remarkably small public subsidy (19 per cent of income) to operate. But when the pandemic struck, we were thrown into an immediate cash crisis affecting the entire group. This meant we could no longer cash flow the Northern Ireland government for HMS Caroline.
That a government department could owe a charity any money may be a surprise, but NMRN cash-flowed DfE for the last four years because of DfE’s failure to meet its obligations to operate HMS Caroline when it first opened in June 2016. We are currently undertaking a reconciliation exercise with the department for accrued debts and are grateful for an interim payment of £700,000.
When we raised the issue of the cash flow, which had now become impossible for us to deal with, we warned the DfE that we could not continue to operate Caroline as a museum. But the reaction of the department was to close it down for “operational studies”.
This is hugely disappointing considering the international significance of the ship and its position in Belfast as a catalyst for further maritime heritage tourism growth in the city’s fabulous Victorian docklands.
I am particularly saddened by the loss of the community engagement work which had focused on bringing communities together to better understand the ship’s role when it first arrived in Belfast and in subsequent years.
The ship is an internationally acknowledged world-class asset which we originally planned to tow back to Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard. It would have joined the other world-famous vessels including HMS Victory which attract hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
But we were persuaded by the department’s 2012 decision to fully commit to the ship and to its restoration for which the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Memorial Fund contributed £15m, the largest such grant ever made to a Northern Ireland project.
The department’s public reaction paints a confusing picture of its role and I'm disappointed that it should shade the facts when its representatives attended all project and trustee board meetings since 2012.
These representatives fully understood that calamitous negotiations conducted by DfE regarding leases at the docks, caused two years of delay in opening the site and added £2.5m to the department’s contribution to the project.
The closure of the ship by DfE is either an attempt to sweep things under the carpet in the hope that the story will go away, or an admittance that it has botched things. Either way, closing Caroline, with as yet no plan to re-open, deserves public scrutiny.
:: Professor Dominic Tweddle is director general at the National Museum of the Royal Navy
