Top Dublin museums

Kilmainham was the country’s major prison for well over a century, with prisoners including future prime minister Éamon de Valera. This evocative museum traces the history of the prison, as well as the political and social events that brought many of the prisoners here. An audio-visual presentation in the prison chapel is followed by a guided tour through the dark corridors of the 18th-century part of the building, where you can see the cells occupied by the condemned leaders of the Easter Rising.

We know it’s a bit of a stretch calling it a museum, but a tour of the Guinness Brewery is absolutely unmissable. The tour begins on the ground level with ingredients and ends in the very stylish Gravity Bar atop the brewery with a 360-degree view of Dublin. Along the way you get to see and sniff the various stages of the brewing process. You also get to watch films of old coopers making the casks for the brew and learn how Guinness is created from just four simple ingredients.

The National Gallery houses a fine collection of works from the 14th to the 20th centuries, from Goya, Brueghel, Titian, Velasquez, Rembrandt and Gainsborough, to Monet, Degas and Picasso. One of the gallery’s most important paintings, discovered in the house of the Jesuit Brothers in 1993, is Caravaggio’s long-lost masterpiece, The Taking of Christ.

The Museum of Archaeology and History contains Bronze-Age Irish gold and other fascinating archaeological finds from around the globe. Opened in 1890, the building itself is noteworthy for its elaborate design and state-of-the-art exhibition spaces. The museum contains medieval treasures, metalwork from the Viking period,a small Egyptian gallery and an exhibit focusing on the history of Irish independence.

A local favourite, the Little Museum was set up by Dubliners to introduce their city to visitors. The three-storey Georgian house offers a fascinating insight into the everyday life of Dubliners over the years. The ground floor hosts temporary exhibitions on Dublin themes, while the first-floor front is furnished as a typical mid-20th century drawing room. The other rooms display numerous artefacts, ranging from a vintage telephone and old tram seats to a signed U2 album and a facsimile of James Joyce’s death mask.

Set in a compact neoclassical building, the Natural History Museum is a wonderful shrine to the late-Victorian obsession with travelling and collecting. Old and young warm to the displays of stuffed animals and birds in glass cases, with Irish fauna on the ground floor and more exotic creatures including an Indian elephant upstairs.

The restored Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, which now houses the Irish Museum of Modern Art is Dublin’s most important 17th- century building. The museum has some good permanent collections but the real attractions are the numerous temporary exhibits – there is an international residency programme for artists, and visitors may meet the artists in their studios (depending on schedules).

The James Joyce Museum is one of the most unusual small museums in or around Dublin. It is housed in a Martello Tower; a series of such towers, some 12m high and 2.5m thick, were constructed along the coast at the beginning of the 19th century to guard against invasion by Napoleon. Joyce stayed in the tower only very briefly, and it is the location for the first chapter of Ulysses. Full of Joycean memorabilia, correspondence, and rare editions of books and manuscripts, it is a shrine for Joyce enthusiasts.