Description of the attraction
The National Museum of Ireland specializes in Irish art, culture and natural history.
The museum was founded on 14 August 1877 by a special act of the Irish Parliament. A special building was erected on Kildare Street in Dublin and opened in 1890. The new museum displayed coins, medals, the most important archaeological finds, including the Arda bowl and the Tara brooch, as well as ethnographic and geological collections.
At first, the museum was called the Dublin Museum of Science and Art, then the National Museum of Science and Art, and since 1921 it has been called the National Museum of Ireland. Like any museum on a national scale, the National Museum lacked both exhibition space and storage space for collections. In 1994, the Collins barracks, a complex of buildings from the 18th-19th centuries, were transferred to the museum. The first part of the expositions was opened there already in September 1997. Another branch of the museum is located in the city of Mayo.
Now the funds of the museum have almost 4 million exhibits, of which almost two million belong to the section of archeology. It features golden items from the ancient Celtic era, items from the early Middle Ages and finds from the Viking era. Some of the finds gained worldwide fame and became a kind of symbol of Celtic art. These are, for example, the Arda and Derrinaflan bowls - richly decorated silver vessels, the Tara brooch - a masterpiece of the jewelry art of that time, a golden boat from the Brouter hoard.
The ethnographic collections of the museum were collected in the most distant parts of the world: Polynesia, South America, West Africa, etc. Collections of the section of applied arts and history tell about the culture of the country and its inhabitants over the past two millennia.
The Natural History Museum (part of the National Museum of Ireland) is often referred to as a museum within a museum. now we can see him practically the same as he looked in 1856.
