EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum

EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin’s Docklands offers an immersive experience into the history of Irish emigration. Housed in the restored CHQ building, the museum features 20 interactive galleries that delve into the stories of the ten million Irish who left their homeland, highlighting their influence worldwide. Visitors can engage with digital exhibits, motion-sensor quizzes, and a multilingual audio guide app, making it a family-friendly destination. The on-site Irish Family History Centre provides resources for those tracing their Irish ancestry. Located at Custom House Quay, Dublin 1, D01 R9Y0, the museum is open daily from 10:00 am to 6:45 pm, with last entry at 5:00 pm.

Planning your visit

EPIC tells the story of the ten million people who left Ireland, and it makes an argument: that a country of a few million shaped the world disproportionately through those who departed. Twenty galleries in the vaults of the restored CHQ building on Custom House Quay cover why people left — famine, poverty, politics, opportunity — and what they did afterwards, across music, politics, science, sport, literature, crime and religion. It is fully digital, with no physical artefacts at all: motion-sensor displays, projections, interactive quizzes and a stamped passport that visitors carry through the route.

That format divides opinion. Visitors expecting objects sometimes find it insubstantial; those engaging with the interactives generally find it lands, particularly the sections on the famine emigration and on individual life stories.

The Irish Family History Centre on site offers consultations for visitors tracing ancestry, which is why many people come in the first place. Allow ninety minutes, more with a genealogy session.

Bookable options include entrance tickets, fast-track tickets combined with Great Famine walking tours of the Docklands, and combination tickets with the Jeanie Johnston — a replica famine ship moored on the quays a short walk away, toured below decks, which supplies the physical dimension EPIC deliberately omits. Current availability is shown below.