The National Museum of Ireland presents ASGARD. The conserved 1914 Howth gun running vessel at the Collins Barracks in Dublin, in a permanent exhibition opens to the public from Thursday 9th August 2012.
The yacht Asgard is one of the most iconic items of recent Irish history. From her building in 1905 by Colin Archer, the great Norwegian naval architect, for Erskine and Molly Childers to her pivotal role in the 1914 Howth gun-running and her later use as Ireland’s first national sail-training vessel, the yacht has had many incarnations. Her story is intertwined with many of the wider episodes of 20th-century Irish history, and these can be explored in our other exhibitions in Collins Barracks, ‘The Easter Rising: Understanding 1916’ and ‘Soldiers and Chiefs: Irish Soldiers at Home and Abroad Since 1500’.
From 2007 to 2011, a major programme of conservation of Asgard was undertaken by the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks. The conservation team was led by Master Shipwright and Ship Conservator John Kearon, with the aim of conserving the vessel and in the process saving and securing as much of the existing original components as possible, while also retaining the structural integrity of the vessel. www.museum.ie