Dublin Marathon 2013: National Museum of Ireland

National Museum of Ireland

All public museums are free so I decided to stop in here.

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I walked over from Temple Bar, which was about a 20 minute walk.

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The museum used to be a military barrack. It was named Collins Barracks before it became the National Museum. The large courtyard was where troops would gather in formation while the barracks were in the buildings lining the large square. The original barrack corners of the large square structure open to allow airflow through the square to prevent disease.

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These three pictures capture the Irish military being apart of peace keeping missions post WWII around the world. Many of these exhibits depict when they were in Vietnam but had exhibits from other conflicts and peace keeping missions.

There were other parts of the museum that displays people of Irish descent participating in foreign armies and wars around the world, including the US and Britain for the last three or four centuries, which was very interested and not captured in these three pictures.

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This exhibit was in a large three story hall holding all sorts of artifacts.

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The picture below is a small piece of a large silver collection.

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Below was one exhibit room of furniture design in the early 2000s. There were other exhibits for other eras, such as 1950s, 1970s and 1990s. It was a bit sad to see furniture I grew up with as history.

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The next picture shows Irish clothing throughout the years.

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Albert Bender had an extensive art collection that includes Asian and Japanese art. His collection was donated to the museum and some of it was on display here. The pictures is of some Chinese Art as statues or tapestries.

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There was a separate exhibit outside of the National Museum of Ireland that house the Asgard, which was a ship. It was most famous for smuggling guns into Ireland

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It was restored a few years ago and then put on exhibit here.

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Overall, the museum was very nice and worth while to walk through. The museum is free but you have to pay for parking. You could start the day at Guinness, walk over to the Museum in 20 minutes, then walk back to Temple bar for a meal. You can also get a Luac day pass and take it to Guinness and back to the Museum as both are close to a Luac station.

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