Museum sights in County Cork
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Cobh, The Queenstown Story
The howl of storms almost blows your hair, there's a bit of fake vomit and the people in the pictures all look pretty miserable. That's just one room at Cobh Heritage Centre. Housed in the old train station, this interactive museum is far above average. The room described above deals with the mass Famine emigrations across the Atlantic: trips where the people were green – and not with envy. Displays show how conditions improved – except for the Titanic or Lusitania, which have fateful links to Cobh.
There's also some shocking stuff on the fate of convicts, shipped to Australia in transport 'so airless that candles could not burn'. Scenes of sea travel in the 1950s,…
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A
Clonakilty Museum
The Clonakilty Museum has some memorabilia, including Michael Collins’ weapons and uniform. The museum is run on a voluntary basis; contact the tourist office for exact opening hours.
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B
Cork Public Museum
Located in a pleasant Georgian house in Fitzgerald Park, this museum recounts Cork’s history from the Stone Age right up to local football legend Roy Keane with a diverse collection of local artefacts. There’s a cafe next door.
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C
National Radio Museum
The Natioanl Radio Museum is upstairs in the Cork City Gaol. The prison closed in 1923, reopening in 1927 as a radio station. The change of use is reflected in the museum where, alongside collections of beautiful old radios, you can hear the story of Guglielmo Marconi’s conquest of the airwaves.
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1796 French Armada Exhibition Centre
In the former stables of 18th-century Bantry House you'll find the 1796 French Armada Exhibition Centre, with its powerful account of the doomed French invasion of Ireland, led by Wolfe Tone. The fleet was torn apart by storms; one frigate, La Surveillante, was scuttled by its own crew and today lies 30m down in the bay.
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D
Regional Museum
This nifty museum is based in the 17th-century courthouse that was used for the inquest into the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. The museum contains information on the disaster, as well as curiosities as diverse as Michael Collins' hurley and shoes belonging to the eight-foot-tall Kinsale Giant.
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E
Cork City Gaol
Faint-hearted souls may find this imposing former prison a little grim, but it's certainly worth a visit, if only to get a sense of how crap life was for prisoners a century ago. An audio tour guides you around the restored cells, which feature models of suffering prisoners and sadistic-looking guards. It's very moving, bringing home the harshness of the 19th-century penal system. The most common crime was that of poverty; many of the inmates were sentenced to hard labour for stealing loaves of bread.
The prison closed in 1923, reopening in 1927 as a radio station, so the Governor's House has been converted into the Radio Museum Experience. Alongside collections of…
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Cobh Museum
A small but lively museum is housed in the 19th-century Scottish Presbyterian church overlooking the train station. It holds model ships, paintings, photographs and curious artefacts tracing Cobh's history.
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