Intro: Irish Leisure through the Decades

MPhil student Margaret Aimar spent the last few months at the Museum, carefully selecting and researching a number of items from the Museum’s lesser known articles. Discover her findings, spanning a wide range of topics and materials.

‘What can the archive tell us about everyday life? This was the question I hoped to answer as I began to delve into the National Print Museum’s collections. At first, the items that caught my attention seemed to be a random mix, but more research prompted me to choose an overarching topic of leisure time. From a picture of a tug-of-war team to an advertisement for a new computer lab, the six items chosen all tell something about how Irish people spent their time off. In selecting these, I wanted to cover a range of decades across the twentieth century. Some items have more in common with others, including themes like sports, dancing, fundraising, and the arts. In different ways, they all reveal something about Irish social and cultural life, some perhaps more unexpected than others!’

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