The Asgard is seen as having played a key role in the events leading to the 1916 Rising.
Erskine Childers, an English civil servant and novelist with Irish nationalist sympathies, used his boat to land 900 rifles and 20,000 rounds of ammunition at Howth in July 1914, to be used to arm the Irish National Volunteers, the nationalist force set up in response to the Ulster Volunteer Force.
He went on to join the British intelligence service during the first World War.
He returned to Ireland afterwards, becoming involved in the first Dáil as director of publicity. He sided with anti-Treaty deputies in 1922, but was arrested in possession of a pistol later that year and executed by a Free State firing squad at Beggars Bush Barracks.
The Asgard was sold by the Childers family in 1926 and purchased by the State in the early 1960s.