For every swish art gallery or modern interactive exhibition space, there's a small museum full of odd artefacts and almost forgotten paraphernalia. Fiona McCanntakes a trip around some of Dublin's lesser known museums

REVENUE MUSEUM: WHO KNEW TAXES COULD BE TRANSFIXING?

The Revenue Museum might be the last place you’d expect to see a toilet on display, but there are plenty such surprises to be found in this small collection of facts and artefacts artfully assembled in the chapel crypt in Dublin Castle’s Lower Yard.

Here you’ll find the history of taxation in Ireland detailed from the days of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and right up to the present. For a stark reminder of how revenues have changed in the past 90 years or so, check out the first book of accounts for the Irish Free State, handwritten in 1923, when the government collected a mere £5 million in income tax all year. Turn the corner for the 2007 version, and the figure has gone up to €47 billion.

As well as facts and figures, however, the museum boasts old tax ledgers, weighing scales, a 1950s comptometer and even a butter spit used by customs officers to probe consignments of butter for concealed objects.

Interactive displays, tax-related quotations, cartoons, videos and even a poem on the museum itself from former Revenue employee Dennis O’Driscoll are mixed with the archival material, while a charred document from the burned Customs House has pride of place in its own display case.

There’s also a corner devoted to illegal imports, with hollowed books and de-stuffed teddy bears used to conceal chemical contents, along with the aforementioned Frost toilet, used by customs officials to examine the waste of suspected drug swallowers. Who knew taxes could be so transfixing?

Opening hours: Monday-Friday, 10am-4pm. 01-8635601. Admission free

IRISH JEWISH MUSEUM: TEEMING WITH PHOTOS AND REMINDERS

Located on Portobello’s Walworth Road, in its heyday the beating heart of Dublin’s Jewish community, the Irish Jewish Museum occupies two adjoining houses that once boasted a functioning synagogue upstairs.

When the synagogue fell into disuse as a place of worship, it was preserved by the building’s owners. Later, Asher Benson teamed up with brothers Raphael and Asher Sive, and galvanised other members of the local Jewish community to create a museum to preserve the Jewish contribution to Irish cultural heritage.

The museum was opened in 1985 by the then Israeli president, Irish-born Dr Chaim Herzog. It documents the history of Irish Jews from the first arrivals through to the mass immigration from Central and Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, which saw the population of Jews in Ireland expand from 472 in 1881 to 2,644 just a century later.

The ground-floor display contains a substantial collection of memorabilia relating to the Irish Jewish communities down through the ages, including a Guinness bottle with its label in Hebrew, prayer shawls and prayer books, and a circumcision bag and instruments.

The building’s original kitchen is preserved with two sinks for the separation of meat and milk, and a table set for the Sabbath meal. Beside the kitchen door, the walls are teeming with photos and reminders of key Jewish personalities, artists, politicians and businessmen who rose to prominence in Ireland over the years.

Also on display is a copy of a request sent to the then taoiseach Éamon de Valera asking him to admit Jewish refugees during the second World War, a request he refused. Upstairs, the synagogue is preserved with all its ritual fittings, as well as a wedding canopy and gallery of Jewish religious objects.

Opening hours: May 1st-September 3rd, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, 11 am-3.30pm; October 1st-April 30th, Sundays only, 10.30am-2.30pm. Admission free; donations accepted.

www.jewishireland.org/museum_2.html

GARDA MUSEUM: A CLUTTERED MONUMENT TO IRISH POLICING

Located in an 800-year-old records tower in Dublin Castle, the Garda Museum is a hotchpotch of Irish police history displayed in corners and cases, on walls and desks, and in every nook and cranny of its five floors. To enter, ring the doorbell just next door to the Revenue Museum, and step inside this cluttered monument to Irish policing.

Here, you’ll find photographs of gardaí in action, including a shot of the rescue of Don Tidey and one of Jim Larkin being frogmarched, as well as statistics about crime, old Garda medals, and historical detail on the Royal Irish Constabulary, the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and the founding of An Garda Síochána.

Here you can see documents signed by Michael Collins to authorise an investigation into the Kildare Mutiny of 1922, and then take the winding stairs up through the tower, as each floor reveals its own treasures. These include a display cabinet filled with old invitations to Garda dances and balls, a noteworthy cufflink collection, and a scattering of Garda uniforms from through the ages.

Right at the summit is the tower’s newest room, which boasts a fascinating collection of old Garda walkie-talkies, speedguns and personal radios.

It takes some time to wade through the jumbled collection, but it’s well worth the effort to unearth gems such as the 1921 Royal Irish Constabulary document containing a description of the wanted criminal Michael Collins, noting his “big and prominent” ears and his “determined, but not bad-looking” expression.

Opening hours: Monday-Friday, 9.30am-4.30pm. Weekends by appointment only. 01-6669998. Admission free

Museum of Broken Relationships:   make an exhibition of your ex

While museums are there to archive the past, you also visit to wonder at how different, how odd things were before. A visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships – a travelling exhibition currently in Kilkenny – is a visit to a more recent past, yet the artefacts are just as strange, their captions revealing that you don’t have to go far back to discover an awful lot of oddness.

We’ve all been there: clutched teddy bears, shed tears, hoarded little notes, held on to a smelly T-shirt, dried a rose, written bad poetry; and we’ve all kept these things, like fetishes of connection with someone we love or, more poignantly, who once loved us. Dreamed up in Croatia by Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic, this museum collects and displays these things anonymously, with notes from their former owners about what they once meant, and how it all ended.

There is a small Clanger (those pink moon creatures that used to be on TV), with an accompanying text explaining that the man who gave it was as distant as if he, too, was from another planet. There are two packets of hair dye donated by a bitter man, a vial of tears, a candy thong given by a woman who says her former love turned out to be as cheap and thoughtless as his presents. There’s a wedding dress, a line of bras and a mobile phone with the text: “It was 300 days too long. He gave me his cell phone so I couldn’t call him any more.”

The museum is online, and is also touring the world, gathering exhibits as it goes. In the online version, you can upload texts and e-mails instead of deleting them, and lock them away until you can bear to read them.

The Museum of Broken Relationships is at www.brokenships.com, and at Kilkenny Co Council Arts Office until August 31st. 056-7794138 - GEMMA TIPTON