EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum

So we got a good night's sleep.

The next day, we had a beautiful breakfast in our hotel, and we got to head to the Irish Immigration Museum.

This is a fully digital museum, so I was expecting something that was kind of old, but no, it was very interactive, which made it a lot more fun than just a lot of plaque reading, I guess.

That was another one of the things that I would have never gone to on my own, but I actually really enjoyed it.

You're

annoying yourself now with this, but I distract you because you were bringing this from the Epic Museum.

Sorry.

So we actually start all the coach tours now from Epic.

And he just retired.

He built the number one museum in Ireland by another little side note is called the Epic Museum.

And the Epic Museum is this brilliantly interactive museum of immigration from Ireland all over the world.

And it's, if you go to Dublin, you've got to go to the Epic Museum.

And so the chairman of Coca-Cola built this thing.

It's amazing.

mean, the best story I just have is about my grandmother Mearns.

You know, when we played in Ireland, there's a great, great museum in Dublin called Epic.

and they did a genealogy of my grandmother and my grandfather Fitzgerald for me.

There was not as much on my grandfather's side because he was down in the River Shannon area, but my grandmother was from just outside of Dublin and traced it all the way back.

I got a chance to go see cousins and be on the farm and it was with my dad.

My dad came with us for the game and my dad was able to be a part of that.

And Epic is short for Every Person is Connected.

And so if you've never been, I strongly recommend it.

Yes.

Here's a man with a passion for cultural heritage and identity studies, Nathan Mannion, Head of Exhibitions and Programs at EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum at the Dublin Docklands.

Often people that face persecution by nature and by necessity end up creating these kind of secretive networks for communication that, you know, in essence are exclusionary.

And within the museum we explore that a little bit and there's a couple of kind of historical reasons that I think maybe reinforce that point.

And then there was interest from America and it was covered in the Irish Echo and the Irish News and all of the American papers.

So at the end of that walk, Waterways Ireland sat down with us and they had said, look, we're looking at kind of doing all the pathways and maybe we would look towards building the partnerships with the councils, with themselves, with EPIC, the Emigration Museum, because the trail is topped and tailed by two kind of award-winning museums.

And therefore, in 2019, it was launched as the National Famine Way.

And one of the key features of the famine weight is the story.

And the next day on the morning of the Sunday morning, they left Strokes Town and they made their way to Dublin on the following Sunday, as we'll be doing in 2027 as well.

They will be walking from Strokestown all the way to Dublin.

And we'll get into Dublin on Sunday, 23rd of May, and we'll be having a fabulous completion ceremony in the epic Emigration Museum there in Dublin City.

So it's a really nice kind of opening and closing event to what will be a wonderful occasion.

Molly, the Museum of Literature is around the corner from us.

We have the Little Museum of Dublin, Epic Museum, of course, the Guinness Storehouse as well.

I would recommend going out to Hoth.

So it's like a seaside town, 30 minutes on the dart.