Ireland's oldest town house building is now home to the Irish Wake Museum, which traces the customs, traditions and superstitions associated with death from the earliest times to the 20th century.

This imaginative initiative aims to celebrate the fact that death has always been a community event in Ireland. It is both a time of grief and a time of celebration.

The Irish Wake Museum is housed on the site of the former Dean John Collyn's Almshouse, a retirement home for the elderly known as 'God's House for the People', which was founded in 1478 on 2 November, All Souls' Day, the day of the dead. It was founded in 1478 on All Souls' Day, the Day of the Dead, 2 November.

The residents of the former Home paid for their living expenses by praying three times a night for the souls of the alms-givers and the souls of deceased Waterford citizens.

The New Museum is the newest of the Waterford Treasure Museums in Waterford's Viking Triangle, along with the Medieval Museum (Ireland's only museum dedicated to medieval history), the Bishop's Palace, the Irish Museum of Time, the Irish Silver Museum, the King of the Vikings Virtual Reality Experience, and Waterford's Epic Guided Walking Tours.

The museum, which houses an extraordinary array of objects related to the death of Ireland that have been collected by the Waterford Museum of Treasures over the past 10 years, will provide visitors with an opportunity to explore in an intimate way experiential rituals that have attracted global attention and are wholly unique to Ireland.

In addition, the Irish Sukkah Museum has partnered with the award-winning Waterford Whiskey, and visitors will also be able to book tickets for the Irish Sukkah and Whiskey Experience.

At the museum, visitors first arrive in an area that was once a shop, rented to maintain the almshouse, and a new audio-visual display explores how the Irish landscape has been etched by death for six thousand years.

Once inside, visitors will experience stories from the 15th to the 20th centuries through six rooms that explore different themes related to death.

The collection of animal and insect specimens has remained virtually unchanged since the Victorian era due to limited resources and manpower, and the three-year hiatus following the collapse of the museum's staircase in 2007 has led to locals referring to it as the 'zoo of the dead' and the 'museum of museums'.

The Natural History Museum of Ireland, also known as the Zoo of the Dead, is a beautiful structure in its own right, dating back to 1856 and filled with skeletons and taxidermy displays. Little has changed in the years since it opened, which is why it is often described as a museum of museums." The exhibits are spread over four floors, although only the first two are currently open to the public.