Thursday, May 15th, 2025
Since we did not have a site visit or class activity until the evening, Sav and I woke up early and decided to once again explore outside of Dublin. Today’s adventures took us to Mullingar – a small town about an hour and a half outside of Dublin (by bus), and hometown of previous One Direction star Niall Horan. It was really important to Sav to make it to Mullingar, so we got up and we went.
When we got there, our objective was to go see the Niall Horan mural. At first, I thought it was going to be a statue so I literally walked right past it. When I came to and realized that it was instead a painting on the wall, we took pictures with it. But after pictures, we ended up asking ourselves, “now what?”. So we explored a bit, walking to another church, but this one we couldn’t seem to go in so we kept moving.
We found ourselves at (yet another) mall. I don’t know what it is about Europe, but every new place we visited, you didn’t know something was a mall until you were walking into it. And finally, we went to a small park and sat for a bit while we orchestrated our transportation home. We didn’t get to spend too much time in Mullingar, but we still got to experience the small town aesthetic it offered.
We took a bus back (and conked out, we were really tired for some reason). We were able to drop our stuff off at the apartment and then head to our cultural visit for the day – The EPIC Museum.
At first, unsuspecting, because when you walked in it felt like you were walking into (another) mall. But then we were directed downstairs, where the museum of surprising size was.
The EPIC Museum is Ireland’s emigration museum. I thought it was kind of interesting how in America, we have an immigration museum on Ellis Island (a large portion of the immigrants to the States were from Ireland), but here they have an emigration museum (all of the Irish who emigrated to the U.S. and beyond). It was an interesting correlation between the two countries.
The museum covered many different topics including Irish history and reasons for why people left throughout different periods of time. One aspect that stood out to me was the recognition of famous people of Irish descent, specifically the visible pride they have for U.S. presidents that have Irish ancestry.
There are 23 U.S. Presidents with Irish heritage according to the museum:
- Andrew Jackson – 7th President
- James Knox Polk – 11th President
- James Buchanan – 15th President
- Andrew Johnson – 17th President
- Ulysses S. Grant – 18th President
- Chester A. Arthur – 21st President
- Grover Cleveland – 22nd and 24th President
- Benjamin Harrison – 23rd President
- William McKinley – 25th President
- Theodore Roosevelt – 26th President
- William Howard Taft – 27th President
- Woodrow Wilson – 28th President
- Harry S. Truman – 33rd President
- John F. Kennedy – 35th President
- Lyndon B. Johnson – 36th President
- Richard Nixon – 37th President
- Gerald Ford – 38th President
- Jimmy Carter – 39th President
- Ronald Reagan – 40th President
- George H.W. Bush – 41st President
- George W. Bush – 43rd President
- Barack Obama – 44th President
- Joe Biden – 46th President
The museum had a video of Barack Obama playing where he said:
“Irish signatures are on your founding documents. Irish blood was spilled on our battlefields. Irish sweat built our great cities… So you could say there’s always been a little green behind the red, white, and blue”.
These words stood out to me because of their truthfulness and honorable recognition of the Irish impact on America.
After the EPIC museum, Sav and I went back to our apartment, ate dinner, and went to bed; exhausted from the events of the day.