The Shape Of It
Tours last 45–50 minutes, running every half-hour from 10:30 – 17:30
Small groups, led throughout, you’re never left to wander alone.
Told live in English; in Irish by arrangement
For ages 6 and up
Seating is available in all spaces.
The museum is all on one level, with no steps.
Lighting is kept low for atmosphere.
Come a few minutes early with an ear to listen.
The rest happens within.
Your Visit
Your visit is a telling, not a walk around cased exhibits.
You’ll meet your storyteller, who leads your small group through the museum.
At each stop, a story. Myths, folktales and legends from a thousand years of Irish tradition. Live, out loud, the way these stories have always traveled.
No screens. No headsets. No labels to read. Nothing is recorded, nothing is fixed. Each telling forms in the moment with the teller, your group, the day.
You’re part of what shapes it. A voice, a room, and you.
The Concept
The idea of a museum came from a question. Why are there leprechauns in Ireland?
What are they doing here, and why are they not found anywhere else?
The thought swirled around and, like any problem that gets bigger every time you look at it, I started to obsess.
Questions that get answered only produce more questions!
I began to rely on my dreams, and that is not a route that survives daylight examination, so I began to ask around.
And yet more questions, but at last some answers, buried deep in the soft folds of memory of people so wise they had forgotten most of what they knew. They told me, but warned it was a deep well, and no one who had reached the bottom had come back to tell them what they had found.
So it was a problem that could only be solved with many. A museum seemed the way to build a place where conversations about the impossible but not improbable could happen.
Where flights of extraordinary fancy could alight for a moment, linger and disappear.
Stories are a rare way to conjure up ideas as a group, to turn them over, shared and moulded and reshared until they become an invisible resource. Untouched yet accessible.
A living idea of an imagined world.
— Tom O’Rahilly, founder
Our Folklore
Ireland has the second largest folklore collection in Europe, and a literary tradition that stretches back some 1500 years. Further back, stories were told for the entertainment of the masses and the guidance of kings. So, we’re not short of source material!
With the Leprechaun as our guide, we can delve into the deepest parts of the tradition or scale the heights of absurdity. Leprechauns are not confined to the logical, stoical, or bound by the laws of common taste or regulation. They wander freely between this world and the next, caring only for the simplest comforts and the delight of a tale well told.
We don’t know why they’re only found in Ireland, but it’s lucky that they are – long may they continue to frequent the leafy corners of this ancient land!
Storytelling is a nuanced craft and may only be judged in its practice. As an art form it is for the listener to discern what quality it holds. As the founder of the Folklore Commission Seamus Delargey says, “Is rud deacair é.”
