National Wax Museum (Ireland)

The National Wax Museum is a privately owned waxworks museum in Dublin, Ireland. Its most interesting feature is its building – former prayer rooms converted into a cinema and then into the waxworks it is now.

The museum was founded by Donie Cassidy, a former Senator and now a TD. It suffered serious neglect from the mid 1980s until very recently, with low visitor numbers, and very few waxworks being added, except those of new Presidents of Ireland and Taoiseach. The waxworks it has are either of very high quality but very old, or of very poor quality but very recent.

Your path through the museum brings you from a children's area, with wax representations of story book characters, such as Little Red Riding Hood; through a world leaders collection, where the most notable feature is a simulated UN meeting with Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Ayatollah Khomeni and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing all still present as the leaders of their country; through a section of "famous faces", including a still married Prince and Princess of Wales, and a RTE studio with Gay Byrne presenting a talk show; to a section of famous cartoon characters. A surprisingly well produced chamber of horrors, with Vlad the Impaler and Freddie Krueger, amongst others, leads you into an outdated Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where a much younger U2 and still complete Thin Lizzy greet you.

Other unusual works include a representation of the Last Supper, and a display on Pope John Paul II, complete with the actual Popemobile he used on his visit to Ireland in 1979.

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