Plastic Paddies

Megan Nolan on The National Leprechaun Museum. This is the third dispatch in our column VISITOR, about the way museums influence culture. We previously wrote about grottos and Jenny Holzer.

Driving to a festival in Hudson recently with my best friend Daniel and Anna, a person I didn’t really know yet, we passed a giant chair in East New York. 

“Guys, you’re going to want to see how big this chair is,” Anna said, having seen it first, and we craned our necks and chuckled. The giant chair was outside a knick-knack and furniture shop on the side of the highway, though its scale was not representative of the other chairs for sale, which were regularly sized. It was the first notable event of the weekend, we agreed, and would serve as a marker of our trio within the friend group. 

Suddenly, I thought of something I had blocked out for almost fifteen years, something to do with another comically large chair, in a different country, a different world, one I was no longer a part of.  

I was twenty and living in Dublin, more broke and desperate than I had ever been before or since. I was a two time university dropout spending rent money on frozen pizza and wine so acrid that it should have been illegal, waking up screaming. I really needed a job. 

The National Leprechaun Museum had just opened, which I was aware of because a guy I knew named Bobby had gotten a job there. I didn’t know what the Leprechaun museum was, but it made sense that Bobby would work there, being in possession as he was of a picturesque Irishness that was marketable and attractive, almost oppressive—pale blue eyes that actually twinkled, a gift for gregarious yarn-spinning, a spindly elvin grace which seemed mythological. One day in my usual hungover state I passed by and saw they were hiring and decided on a whim to enquire.

The Leprechaun Museum has been widely referred to as the most boring attraction in Ireland. This makes good sense because it is a strange task to construct a museum around a thing which does not and has never existed. In its way, it’s an inspiring act of derring-do to devote a museum—a thing notionally dedicated to preserving something important—to an intangible concept which is not only unreal but also dumb and often offensive. 

Nothing happens in the Leprechaun Museum. You pay twenty bucks to get in, which many of the dreadful reviews complain about but honestly, what were they expecting? Did they think there would be a leprechaun? And if there was one, did they think twenty bucks was a fair price to see it? 

There are some optical illusions and clips from movies and TV shows, and the main thing that happens is that a very charismatic person, a person like Bobby, tells you stories and snippets of folklore and bedazzles you with Irishness. When I went in and asked if they were holding interviews, the manager said that I could just try out right now—what mattered wasn’t the information, it was the natural spark of the storyteller. 

“Just tell me about your week,” he said, gleaming with Celtic jubilance, “But tell it to me in the way you might speak to the tourists coming in here. We always end the tour on the giant chair down here, so they can take pictures, put on the hats and beards if they like.” 

I tried to do as he asked, but the noises coming out of me were so strangled and the life they were describing so impoverished and pathetic: I cannot live like this, I thought to myself, in the National Leprechaun Museum, sitting on the giant novelty chair where my interview to be a tour guide was swiftly concluded. I vowed to change literally every single thing about my life, which I did, more or less. 

The next time I changed everything about my life was a few years later in another painfully inadequate Irish museum. I had fallen in love with an artist who, though Irish himself, clearly held some scathing derision for Dublin and what people made and did there. 

You have to get out, he kept telling me, you’ll never do anything here. He didn’t really care what I did ultimately, but I blew it all up just because I thought it might impress him and I’m still glad I did. The day I resolved I would leave everything and start again, we were in the National Wax Museum. We had been stumbling around town the day after some big private view, bitching about all the losers and tryhards. 

I had never felt happier than sitting with him around a table of waxworks of victims of the Irish famine, the representation of which was simply sad looking people morosely holding knives and forks contemplating empty plates. 

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Wait, I said, I think we should go to the Leprechaun Museum now. I could feel it rising in me that I would go away from Dublin soon forever and I wanted to do all the stupidest things there were to do, to drink in all the plastic paddy souvenir bullshit to harden myself against it and try not to reckon with what I was actually leaving behind. 

I paid $40 for us to go into the Leprechaun Museum and we let the garrulous tour guide regale us but really what I wanted was to see the artist on the giant chair. I was breathless with laughter and admiration and I looked up at him, this big beautiful man that even the giant chair could not diminish, and thought, whatever you say, I’ll do.

After I moved to London, the artist said to me that I could never go backwards, never move back to Ireland. If you want to leave London you’ll have to move to Tokyo, or New York, and ten years later, long since having dropped out of contact with him, I followed his advice again and landed in Brooklyn, and met everyone I love now, and I was in this car with Daniel, someone closer to me than my own self, and someone I didn’t know at all, looking out at the giant chair on the highway and feeling the artist and the years rush by me as we moved. 🪑

ON CHAIRS