Overview
Completed in 1704, Collins Barracks is one of the oldest purpose-built military barracks anywhere in the world, and it stayed in service for close to three centuries before the last soldiers marched out in 1997. It’s now the National Museum of Ireland’s Decorative Arts & History collection: free to get into, and the quietest of the museum’s Dublin sites, which is half the appeal. It stands on the Liffey’s north bank in Arbour Hill, a few minutes from Phoenix Park.
If you’ve an hour, make for the 1916 and Irish wars galleries and the Asgard – the yacht that ran guns into Howth in 1914 – then double back for Eileen Gray. The rest rewards browsing, but those are the pieces worth crossing town for.
A barracks first, a museum second
The ground was part of the Norse settlement of Oxmantown before any of this; you can still read it in nearby street names like Viking Road. The land passed to the Duke of Ormond, and his grandson sold it to Queen Anne in 1703 for a new barracks. Thomas Burgh, the Surveyor General, had the main ranges up by 1704 – granite-faced blocks around open squares, built to hold some 1,500 men with stables and a riding school. Later hands changed it: in the mid-18th century Christopher Myers raised Palatine Square by a storey and widened it, and the Riding School of 1746, first meant as a chapel, carries an 18 m roof span (which is how, in the 1970s, it came to host an Eric Clapton concert for army personnel).
The barracks sat at the centre of things in 1916, when troops from here were sent against the rebels at the Four Courts and the GPO; Wolfe Tone was among those held within its walls in an earlier age. The sheer number of soldiers shaped the neighbourhood too – Benburb Street alongside was long one of the city’s red-light districts. Handed to the Free State in December 1922, it was renamed for Michael Collins, and the army kept it until 1997, when it reopened as a museum. The conversion – old stone laced with glass galleries – won the RIAI’s Silver Medal for Conservation in 2002.
What to see
Reception is in the former Privates’ Mess, where old plans and photographs set the scene. The South Block holds the big set-pieces: one of the world’s largest collections of Irish silver, from Georgian tea services to ecclesiastical work, and floors of furniture, scientific instruments and domestic pieces tracing everyday life. A gallery to Eileen Gray, Ireland’s great modernist designer, gathers the E-1027 table, the chrome side table and the Bibendum chair. Nearby sits the Fonthill Vase, a Chinese porcelain piece of around 1300 and one of the earliest documented in Europe, shown with the Albert Bender collection of Asian art.
The West Block runs chronologically through Ireland’s economic and political story. The pick of it: the 1916 Rising and Irish wars galleries, with weapons, personal effects and photographs; a millennium of coins and currency; and the Asgard, the restored 1914 yacht from the Howth gun-running. The Way We Wore covers 250 years of Irish dress, and the East Block’s “What’s in Store?” opens up the reserve collections that usually stay hidden.
Temporary shows rotate: recent ones (into 2026) have included A New Form of Beauty, on Dublin youth culture and street style from the 1960s to the 1990s, and The Weight of Words, built around the museum’s brass weights. From summer 2025 the museum has also been showing natural-history specimens moved over from the closed Natural History Museum, among them Spoticus the giraffe and the skeleton of a Giant Irish Deer. Check what’s on before you go.
Practical information
- Admission: free, to the permanent galleries and most temporary shows.
- Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 10am – 5pm; Sunday and Monday 1pm – 5pm, with a late opening to 8pm on the last Thursday of the month (‘Dublin by Dusk’). Closed Christmas Day, St Stephen’s Day and Good Friday.
- Quiet Hour: a sensory-friendly session runs 10 – 11am on the last Saturday of each month.
- Bags: the cloakroom is small – don’t bring anything larger than a backpack.
- Accessibility: step-free throughout, with four lifts, accessible toilets, baby-changing and wheelchairs at reception.
- Café and shop: a small café in the South Block does coffee and light lunches; the shop stocks books, craft and silver replicas.
Getting there
The Luas Red Line stops at Museum (right outside) and Heuston (a five-minute walk along Benburb Street), and Dublin Bus routes run along Benburb Street. Contrary to what you may read elsewhere, there is on-site pay-and-display parking: €2 for an hour, €5 for four, €10 for the day (car park open Mon–Sat 7.30am–6pm, Sun 1–5.30pm), with seven blue-badge spaces. Dublinbikes and bike racks are at the door.
Nearby
The barracks sits in a dense historical quarter. Arbour Hill Cemetery, just north, holds the graves of the 1916 leaders; Croppies’ Acre by the western gate remembers the 1798 dead. West lies Smithfield, with the Jameson Distillery on Bow Street and the Light House Cinema, and Phoenix Park and the Wellington Monument are within a walk. Time your visit for the last Thursday of the month and you can have the galleries into the evening, then step out into the square to see the barracks the way the architects meant it to be seen.