Review: Tour of Collins Barracks Conservation Department

Collins Barracks is not just the location of the National museum of decorative arts and History, but it is also home to the conservation department for the whole of the national museum of Ireland. The National museum consists of four sites. Three of these museums are located in Dublin. They are Collins Barracks National Museum of decorative arts, The National museum of Archaeology, which is in Kildare Street and the Natural history museum, Merion Square. There is also the Museum of Folk life which is located in Mayo.  The Conservation department holds an open tour to the public the last Wednesday of every month and our culture and heritage course visited recently as part of visual arts.

The conservation department is housed in a different building to the decorative museum itself. In the conservation studio they are involved in treating different types of artefacts that would have been collected for the national museum. These can be items that are currently on display or items that will be returned to storage till a later date. The conservation studio has many different departments like the furniture studio, the Archaeology studio, the textile studio and the ceramics and glass studio. On our tour we met different people from the department and they explained a little about what their job would consist of and the material that they use. 

  The part that I enjoyed most of the conservation tour was the archaeology department. Nieves Fernandez showed us this department. She is not only involved in conservation items but also involved in making replicas. She was currently in the middle of copying a Bronze Age axe head for Kildare Street but also the Rhino horn for the Natural History Museum. The replica of the axe head looked identical but it was considerably lighter. The replicas are made by pouring a liquid that dries into a plastic substance into a mold. The frames for molds are made out of Lego bricks!

UCD Classical Museum

As part of the course, we go on different trips every Wednesday afternoon to other cultural and heritage sites around Dublin. A few weeks ago we visited The Classical Museum in UCD. The Museum was opened in Earlsfort Terrace in 1910 by Rev Henry Brown who was the professor of Greek in UCD at that time. In 1971 the Museum was moved to its current location at the Belfield campus.

What I found really interesting about this museum is that it is a teaching museum. This means that a lot of the artifacts that are stored and on display there are to teach the students of classics and archaeology in the college. During the tour we were able to see lots of different artifacts like vases from different places, a huge range of coins comparing some of the old Irish currency with traditional Greek and Roman coins and a case of Egyptian artifacts. The curator of the museum even let us pass around a piece of dressing that was used to bandage a mummy.

We also learned that to preserve a mummy, the organs were taken out from their belly button and their brains were taken out through their nostrils and they were stored in jars in the tomb.  After the tour was over, we were all giving gloves and got to pass around some of their collection. We saw Roman jugs for storing oil for lamps from the 1^st century BC or AD, some interesting miniature figures that would have been buried in an Egyptian tomb with the mummy and a replica of the earliest form of money in the Roman Empire. It was an amazing experience.

Home Rule in Ireland

We are coming to the end of our Irish History module and this week in class we have been looking at the passing of the Home Rule Act of 1912 and the 1916 rising. We also went to visit the Asgard Exhibition at the National Museum Collins Barracks. The Asgard was used to smuggle weapons and ammunition into Ireland for the nationalist cause in July 1914. The action was designed to imitate the Larne gun running and other arms smuggling which the unionists in Ulster had undertaken.  The nationalists were not as succesful as the unionists, however. While the arms were unloaded by the Irish Citizen Army with relative success, Dubliners lined the streets to jeer the soldiers who had been attempted to stop the unloading of the arms. This prompted the soldiers to open fire on the assembled crowd. They shot dead three and wounded thirty-eight Dubliners. As well as the ship, the exhibition has footage of the returning soldiers as they made their way up the Dublin Quays and of the funerals of those who were killed.

The ship is a wonderful piece of tangible history. My favourite part of the exhibition (a part from the Asgard itself) is this wonderful image of the ‘Home Rule egg’ which shows the building tension in Ireland from 1912 when it became clear that the Home Rule bill would pass into law. The Ulster Covenant signed on 28 September 1912 showed that while the bill had passed through parliament, a sizeable portion of the Ulster population were prepared to do everything in their power to stop the introduction of Home Rule. It’s amazing how such a simple image can capture the complexities of the politics of the day. It also fits nively with our next visit which will be to see the Hugh Lane exhibition ‘Revolutionary States: Home Rule and Modern Ireland’

Freemason’s Grand Lodge, Molesworth Street

We couldn’t resist posting these pictures from our Wednesday afternoon trip out. This week we visited the Freemason’s Grand Lodge on Molesworth Street. Our guide is pitcured above in the Templars chapel of the lodge. As he guided us through the cermonial rooms he dispelled many of the myths surrounding the Freemasons and did a fantastic job of answering all of our questions. It was a very interesting afternoon and an excellent tour.

Kilmainham Gaol visit

We were very excited about our trip to Kilmaingham Gaol which took place last week! Our tour guide, Liz, navigated us around the two prison wings imparting much eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century political and social history. We having been learning about some of the soldiers stationed in Beggars Bush Barracks including the auxiliaries who were stationed here during the War of Independence. Liz told us all about the political prisoners locked up by these soldiers during the 1916 rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War which provided a great contrast for us especially as we are beginning to study this period of history in class at the moment. Ricky was, as ever, on hand to take pictures and has provided these wonderful shots.

Thanks for the excellent tour Liz!