Heritage Week

National Heritage Week is coordinated by The Heritage Council and its aim is to build awareness and education about our heritage thereby encouraging its conservation and preservation.  Every year hundreds of libraries, museums and local groups throughout the country organise activities and events which are open to all. We are very pleased to be part of Heritage Week once again this year and look forward to welcoming visitors to Academy House. 

The theme for Heritage Week 2019 is Pastimes | Past Times.

Collecting history: A tour of Academy House & Library

These tours will walk you through the Georgian rooms of Academy House and its nineteenth-century Reading Room and Meeting Room. You will learn about some of the bibliophiles and scholars who spent their time collecting books and manuscripts, which are now part of the Library’s collections. Was it pure research, a Victorian pastime or a bibliophile’s obsession?
Tours will last approx. 1 hour. No individual booking required. Group bookings please contact: library@ria.ie / 01-6090620

Tour times:

Monday 19 August, 11am
Tuesday 20 August, 11am
Thursday 22 August, 11am
Friday 23 August, 11am

Lunchtime Lecture : Wednesday 21 August, 1pm : 'A Photographic History of Hurling' by Professor Paul Rouse, UCD.

This illustrated talk will explain the evolution of hurling across more than 100 years. It will look at how an ancient game was taken from history and modernised. It places the making of modern hurling within the context of the political and social history of modern Ireland. It will bring alive the stories of the men and women who played the game - although for women it was renamed 'camogie'. It will examine how - for a century - hurling offered Irish people a day out with a difference – a unique cocktail of sport, drink, music and pageantry, which mixed the local with the national. 

Paul Rouse is Associate Professor of History at University College Dublin. He has written extensively on the history of Irish sport.

Free admission. No individual booking required. Group bookings please contact: library@ria.ie / 01-6090620

Exhibition : Discovering Thomas Moore: Ireland in nineteenth-Century Europe

Find out more about Moore! An exhibition at the Royal Irish Academy Library, in collaboration with Queen’s University Belfast.

Exhibition : A Forgotten Polish Hero of the Great Irish Famine: Paul Strzelecki’s Struggle to Save Thousands

An exhibition by the Polish Embassy in Dublin exploring the fascinating life and achievements of one of the great humanitarians of the nineteenth century.

Free admission. Exhibitions open during Heritage Week : Monday 19 August - Friday 23 August 10am - 5pm. We regret that access is restricted when conferences are taking place. Please check website for updates on opening times – www.ria.ie/library