THE new GPO Witness History tourist attraction that’s built around the events of 1916 is targeting 300,000 visitors annually and already has more than 20,000 confirmed bookings, six weeks ahead of its official opening.
The exhibition and interactive experience will take in its first visitors on Easter Tuesday, March 29, and details of the centre were revealed at an official briefing in the GPO earlier this month.
The €7 million centre is in a hidden courtyard at the back of the GPO that most of us have never seen and its in its final stages of construction. The project has been kept under wraps until now, but the advance bookings show word has still spread to visitors from as far away as New Zealand and China.
Witness History is one of the Government’s flagship projects for the 1916 commemorations but it won’t be depending on State funding and will have to pay for itself if its to survive beyond the year ahead.
However, both An Post and Shannon Heritage, who are managing the visitor centre, are confident that it’ll pull in enough bodies to keep going well into the future.
As you’d expect, the focus will be very much on the events surrounding the Rising, but it’ll evolve over time to include revolving exhibitions on related material such as 1916’s lasting legacies.
An Post’s Director of Communications, Barney Whelan, says the centre will avoid controversy by presenting the history of 1916 without interpretation.
General Manager of Shannon Heritage, Aline FitzGerald, added: “The aim of the centre is to give visitors a real sense of what it was like to be in the GPO and Dublin at that time and to reflect on how those days shaped Ireland in the 100 years since.”
Witness History is also aiming to make the experience one that will have visitors wanting to come back for more. One of the highlights will be an immersive semicircular, audiovisual space that puts visitors right inside the GPO during the five days in which it was both the military command centre, and the seat of the Provisional Irish Government.
A digital recreation of Dublin as it was in 1916 will provide both an immersive street level experience, and a ‘God’s Eye’ overview of events, that’ll highlight the difficulty of co-ordinating a national revolution from the GPO, in a city under siege from overwhelming Crown forces.
There’ll also be a hands-on activity area that allows visitors to print proclamations and bulletins using lead type and use interactive maps to route military dispatches to beleaguered outposts.
The centre will be officially launched by An Taoiseach on March 25 and opened to the public on March 29. Tickets from www.gpowitnesshistory.ie cost €10 a head, with family tickets starting at €25 for a family of four and rising to €30 for a family of eight.
