EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin, with an Expert Guide

Follow the story of the Irish diaspora through twenty interactive galleries in Dublin's Docklands vaults, with a specialist to bring it alive.

A Passport in the Vaults

EPIC occupies the stone-vaulted cellars beneath CHQ on Custom House Quay in Dublin’s Docklands, a riverside store for tobacco and wine dating from 1820. Those heavy old vaults give it an atmosphere no purpose-built visitor centre could fake.

Everyone receives a small green passport, stamped in each gallery, which captures the shape of the visit: a journey in a set order, from leaving to legacy. There are very few objects. Instead, screens, projections, audio, motion sensors and immersive installations put individual stories first, ahead of any list of names and dates. The guided tour runs daily at 1 pm, Monday to Friday, covering all twenty galleries in about an hour led by an expert whose insight goes much further than wandering alone.

Five Million at Home, Seventy Million Abroad

About 5 million people live in Ireland, yet some 70 million worldwide claim Irish roots, the legacy of hundreds of years of departures, whether forced by hunger, hardship, war, persecution for faith or exile for politics, or, lately, chosen for work or simply a new life.

It began long before the Famine. People were already leaving in large numbers before 1845, after the risings of 1798 and 1803 collapsed, while the Penal Laws hemmed in Catholic life, and by a rural economy that couldn’t support its people. The Famine years of 1845 to 1852, when a million died and another million left, sped up a process already underway. A century and a half of scattering followed, one of the longest of any nation in modern times. Irish emigrants laid railroads, nursed in hospitals, entered politics and wrote books across America, Britain, Canada, Australia and Argentina, often in places that didn’t want them.

The museum tells it without sentiment or simplification. A whole gallery is given to the Famine, the Magdalene Laundries are faced head-on, and another gallery traces Ireland’s journey from deep social conservatism to becoming the first nation anywhere whose voters chose marriage equality at the ballot box, a chapter LGBTQ+ visitors will find especially moving.

Why Take the Guided Tour

The self-guided route takes about 90 minutes and works well for independent visitors, but on busy days the first galleries get crowded, and the fixed order makes it hard to linger where it matters without falling out of step. The guided visit covers the same ground with personal and historical context the displays can’t give. Your guide is a trained specialist, and the hour is built around conversation and storytelling rather than moving from screen to screen. If you’re tracing your own family’s emigration, or want to grasp the social and political pressures that made people go, there’s room for questions and connections the solo route doesn’t offer.

From Leaving to Belonging

The route runs from the decision to go, through the crossing and arrival, to what Irish people built overseas. Galleries one to three look at what pushed people out and what drew them to particular places, and galleries four to seven examine the forces behind different waves: religion, politics, economics and the state. Most powerful is the Famine room, kept dark, with a soundscape and the words of people who lived through it, taken from their own diaries and letters.

Galleries eight to eighteen follow Irish influence around the world: in the White House, where over twenty presidents have traced Irish roots; in Australia, where the Irish formed a large share of early settlers; in Britain’s National Health Service, heavily staffed by Irish nurses and doctors through the twentieth century; and in culture, where authors, musicians and film-makers with Irish blood shaped the countries they came to call home. The last galleries turn to today’s diaspora, Ireland’s shift into a country people move to as well as leave, and what Irish identity means now. Your Out Of Office LGBTQ+ travel specialist can fit the visit into a stay at a welcoming Dublin hotel.