Museum

On Sunday we took a visit to Ireland's Natural History Museum, to complete our circuit of tourist attractions and well.. lacking anything else to do. I hadn't been to the place since I was knee high to a grasshopper (and not one of the big ones they had pinned to the display board in the museum) and I'd promised Keiko a chance to see a dinosaur skeleton. Of course this was just presumption on my part - I'd got it into my head that Ireland, at some stage in eons past must have had a few dinosaurs, and like most places (I think) would have some fossils on display of them in the national museum. Well it turns out the only fossil is actually the museum itself. Man, it felt like I'd wondered into the personal collection of some victorian hunter, each animal on display brought down by his own elephant gun. The muesums contents can't have been updated for at least 30 years - all the explanations are on short yellowing display cards obviously typed up on some extinct typewriter. The ground floor contains glass cases full of stuffed birds and small mammals, all Irish, each display card explaining the most important details of the creature - namely, where and when it had been shot. Towards the back, in glass cases protected by leather covers were the insects and squirmy things in jars. The first and second floors were more of the same - stuffed examples of big cats and bears, hippos and rhinos...real specimans, stuffed and held together by tape and falling apart after so many years of neglect and display. Why? In the past month I've been to the two other national history museums in Dublin and both of them are slick and modern and do a great job of displaying their wares. Sunday's place was busier than the the other two places (admittedly most of these were kids in prams screaming at the slack jawed grizzly with its eye dangling from its socket). Theres no lift, a tiny souvenir shop at the front, no space or anywhere to sit down, and not even a single blinking LED to signal that yes, this is the 21st century. With so many visitors surely there's budget to update everything, display stuff in some sort of appropriate context, complete with dinosaur stuff (cos what kid doesn't like dinosaurs) to do the country proud.