You are on the Board and have been notified by a member. I have discussed these things with other Board members. There is a push to raise a lot of money. No one mentioned your pet project of a history of the pipes at the meeting as the key activity for the worldwide group/club to move forward on. The only effective way to serve a worldwide membership is to survey (written, verbal) and compile results; that data guides the organization’s direction. Counting on members to turn up at an expensive and out-of-the-way location like Cavan on a specific date and time to deliver in an impromptu manner the ideas going forward is doomed to failure.
Restricting the interest of the organization to pipers only is short sighted as how can one guage where the next piper or interest (of any variety)will come from. Don’t ‘tourists’ and locals (some with heavy, distant Irish backgrounds; some with none) have an interest in the national traditional folk music and its heritage? Also, why restore a Georgian building if not to show it off and use it as a showcase? The club has artifacts but virtually none have ever been displayed.
Jim,
If you genuinely want me to approach the board on your behalf then I will gladly do so if you contact me privately (ie. not on a public forum) with a clear statement of what you want proposed on your behalf. I will present it to the whole board so that it may recieve the best possible consideration. My email address is not on the website but most other board member addresses are. The reason why the “Contact Us” feature is up there is so that members can contact the commitee with matters they wished raised at meetings among other things. This system strikes me as much more practical than instigating a global members survey and all the paperwork and browbeating that it would involve. My email address is:
You are taking my ‘pet project’ as you call it (it is actually only an idea) completely out of context. I am proposing it to this forum as an idea in the context of this discussion heading, not to the board of NPU. Anyway, projects are given the go ahead or shelved or refused by the board collectively, not by an AGM decision. I have another entirely different project to consider. I don’t mind stating though that I believe that the Dublin premises should be secondary to publications that all members can avail of (secondary that is up to a point ie. if the building ever started to fall on people or give them nightmares!). Others may disagree and that is their right, NPU is an open organisation that allows for disagreement thankfully.
If you read my last post carefully you will see that I personally am all for opening the building up to interested parties whoever they may be, what I would be opposed to is a tourist jamboree where bus tours pull up and are hearded about the place. On the issue of short sightedness: as it stands full membership of the club is restricted to pipers -it is a piper’s club- is that short sighted or just common sense? There are of course various out-reach
activities to schools and the like, I’d like to see more of this myself and am acting accordingly.
If you really want anything done in the club then the best way to do it of course is to put a proposal in and do it yourself. An awful lot of chin wagging could be saved and you would’nt be relying on the already stretched staff or the board who are all just members and volounteers. The chairman of the board is all for active member participation in all aspects of the club as you will recall from his comments at the AGM.
Regards,
Harry.
PS. There is always, and I suspect there will always be, a push to raise a lot of money. As I said, the severe and unexpected funding cut lent this a new urgency.
If you really want anything done in the club then the best way to do it of course is to put a proposal in and do it yourself.
Hear, hear! 
In other words, put your time/money/effort where your mouth is. I don’t begrudge Jim or others their opinions because I agree with them. However, I am leery about approaching a mainly volunteer organisation like NPU with these concerns exactly for the reasons Harry mentioned - after all the approvals have gone through, somebody has to do the actual work.
Harry, I am glad to hear your POV - looking after the membership in general, instead of only catering to the local crowd. This is refreshing to me. Besides the Ennis project, which ,from what I’ve heard, will be truly massive, what other projects would you like us to know about?
Thx,
djm
How about the stuff underway that I don’t want you to know about:
Attic room in club being converted for use (by me) as a pent house apartment.
NPU jet being used for personal and family purposes.
Caviar and champagne bill from last board meeting.
Cost to club for Joe Kennedys ‘pimping’ of my pipes.
Cost of removal of my company Ferrari from club swimming pool.
Well, they did say that we should have a more corporate profile… and boys will be boys.
H.
Full (and lethal) disclosure. Now that would be a fun annual report to read 
That’s so true, because I know a lot of “artistic types” who fall also into one or both of the other categories. But mostly, that’s why I like hanging out in sessions and with pipers, because, particularly the Irish natives, it’s really all about the artistic end and all the other diversities of personality and profession and character fall into the background.
Royce