Dublin is a city that wrote itself into world literature, so it should be no surprise that its museums are storytellers first. What is a surprise, for many visitors, is how many of the best ones cost nothing at all — the national collections are free, and they are magnificent.

Key facts

  • Ireland's national museums and the National Gallery are free to enter
  • Most sit within a compact walk of St Stephen's Green and Trinity College
  • The Book of Kells is ticketed and popular — book ahead online
  • Allow two to three hours for the biggest collections

1. Trinity College Old Library and the Book of Kells

The ninth-century gospel manuscript, illuminated with an intensity that borders on the hallucinatory, is Ireland's single most famous object. The experience culminates in the Old Library's Long Room, one of the most beautiful library halls anywhere. Go early or late; midday belongs to the crowds.

Home to Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ — lost for centuries and rediscovered in a Dublin Jesuit house in the 1990s — plus Vermeer, Goya, and the swirling late canvases of Jack B. Yeats, the poet's brother and arguably Ireland's greatest painter. Free, calm and world class.

3. National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology

Where Ireland keeps its treasure, literally: prehistoric gold hoards, the Ardagh Chalice, the Tara Brooch, and the haunting Iron Age bog bodies, preserved down to their fingernails. Few museums in Europe deliver this much wonder per square metre.

4. Chester Beatty

Tucked into the gardens of Dublin Castle, this award-winning collection of manuscripts, miniatures and sacred texts from across Asia, the Middle East and Europe was the gift of an American mining magnate who adopted Ireland. Quietly one of the best museums of its kind in the world, and free.

The headline here is Francis Bacon's studio, moved from London and reconstructed in Dublin down to the last paint-spattered wall and dust layer — an archaeological dig into a painter's mind. Strong Irish and international modern collections surround it.

6. Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA)

Contemporary art housed in the seventeenth-century Royal Hospital Kilmainham, a grand courtyard building with formal gardens. The tension between old architecture and new work is the point, and it works beautifully. Pair it with nearby Kilmainham Gaol, the historic prison central to Ireland's independence story.

7. EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum

In the Docklands, a fully digital museum tracing the Irish diaspora — the ten million who left and the culture they carried with them. Interactive, emotional and sharply designed; a favourite with families.

8. Little Museum of Dublin

A townhouse on St Stephen's Green filled with donated objects telling the story of twentieth-century Dublin, delivered by guides with classic Dublin wit. Small, warm and the perfect first hour in the city.

Tip: Build your day as a triangle — Trinity, then the Archaeology museum, then the National Gallery — all within ten minutes' walk of each other, with Grafton Street's cafes in the middle for the recovery pint of tea.