Ten million people left this island. This is the museum about where they went and what they did, in the vaults of a nineteenth-century dock warehouse.
The subject
Around ten million people have emigrated from Ireland since 1700, from a country whose population peaked at about eight and a half million before the Famine and is still below that figure today. Roughly seventy million people worldwide claim Irish descent.
That is the scale the museum is dealing with, and it takes the sensible decision not to treat it as a single sad story. Emigration here is famine and eviction, and it is also missionaries, soldiers, engineers, criminals, nurses, gangsters, poets and presidents.
Twenty galleries, arranged thematically rather than chronologically: why people went, how they travelled, what they did, and what came back — the music, the writing, the politics, the money.
What it is like
Fully digital. Projections, touchscreens, sound rooms, films. There is not a single historical object in the building, which is a deliberate choice and a divisive one.
What it buys is accessibility. It works for children, for people with no background in Irish history, and for anyone who finds glass cases hard work. What it costs is the encounter with a real thing, which the National Museum does better than almost anywhere.
You are given a passport at the entrance and stamp it in each gallery, which sounds like a gimmick and does a good job of keeping children moving.
The building
The CHQ Building is a tobacco and wine warehouse from 1820, with cast-iron columns and brick vaults. It hosted a banquet for 3,000 Crimean War veterans in 1856. The vaults are the museum.
The genealogy centre
The Irish Family History Centre shares the building. If you have Irish ancestry and a name and rough date, the consultants can usually make progress in a session, and there is a free self-service area. This is the reason a lot of North American visitors come, and it is worth booking.
Practical
Timed tickets online; it is rarely sold out but the discount is better in advance.
The Jeanie Johnston, a replica famine ship moored five minutes upriver, runs guided tours of the below-decks conditions and is a good, grim complement to this.
The Famine Memorial — Rowan Gillespie’s emaciated bronze figures walking the quay — is on the way between the two.
More Museums
National Museum of Ireland — Archaeology
Free, and it holds the best prehistoric gold collection in western Europe plus four Iron Age bog bodies. The single most underrated building in Dublin.
National Gallery of Ireland
Free, with a Caravaggio that spent decades hanging unrecognised in a Jesuit dining room a mile away, and the best Jack B. Yeats collection anywhere.