RTÉ’s The Dead Zoo review: Documentary applauds as our favorite museum reopens

For a child, a visit to a museum is practically a rite of passage. My father took me and my brother there when we were little boys. His father, I imagine, also married him. I took my daughters there when they were little.

Like every little child before and since, they are astounded by most of the exhibits, especially the giant Irish moose skeletons, which fuel one’s imagination. children, and a small number of them were slightly disturbed.

Even as an adult, if you find yourself stuck in the rain alone on Merrion Square with an hour to kill, there’s no better way to kill it than by walking among the careful, silent residents of the Dead Zoo. They were always better company than the noisy creatures living next door in Leinster House.

The museum has been closed to the public for renovations since 2020. This is where Paul Duane’s lovely bank holiday about a documentary, tastefully narrated by Brian Gleeson, begins.

The museum, which opened in 1857 and now looks like it did 100 years ago, can be a wonderful place – “like a child’s toy box”, as Gleeson puts it, albeit a bit creepy. – but it is also, Nigel Monaghan, who kept it for more than half of his 40-year career until his retirement last month, “basically collapsed”.

No insulation and lots of air circulation. The building has a moth problem. The exhibits may be as dead as doornails, but they are edible to one little creature or another.

The renovation – a four-year project that continued during the Covid-19 lockdown – had to start with fixing the glass roof. But before that can be done, thousands of exhibits need to be moved out of the building to an offsite storage facility.

It is a large, complex and often dangerous job that requires experts. The team assembled here – curators, conservators, art handlers, construction workers accustomed to working outdoors – are often as colorful as creatures preserved in glass cases.

Senior curator Paolo Viscardi said: “Moving a taxidermy is like moving furniture. Push, pull, out the door and into the truck. The heads of the game, either from stately homes or gifted by gentleman hunters, are all manual jobs.

The hardest challenges come from the smallest exhibits and the biggest ones. Formerly a Blaschka model, exquisite glass representations of sea creatures were created by master artisans Leopold and Ralph Blaschka in Dresden, Germany, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 20. They are beautiful, fragile things, and the museum’s collection includes some of the rarest Blaschkas made. Just watching Paolo carry one tray after another of models into the storage room makes me nervous.

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For the largest exhibits, they are two whale skeletons suspended from the ceiling of the museum. It is extraordinary to think that the older of the two, a giant fin whale, died in Bantry Bay in 1851, when the Famine was still raging and Herman Melville Moby Dick has just been published.

The job of dismantling the skeleton, parts of which were reconstructed with plaster of Paris and wood as the whale had already decomposed when the classifier arrived, fell into the hands of expert whale dismantler Mickel van Leeuwen, who forged a career from childhood after he brought home a dead chipmunk one day.

This maneuver takes up the biggest part of the documentary, and it’s fascinating – and at times stressful – to watch.

The museum’s ground floor reopens to the public today (free but you must book in advance). But there are still 3,000 objects that need to be moved and two more years of work before the beloved Museum of the Dead returns fully.