IT’S EARLY afternoon in Collins Barracks, and I’m standing with a rifle by my side while a drill sergeant shouts instructions at me. Well, that’s only partly true. I’m inside the National Museum - but the drill sergeant is on a screen in front of me and the rifle is a replica.

You wouldn’t be able to swing the rifle at the enemy, given that’s tethered to the wall.

This is part of an interactive addition to the museum that will give the public a hands-on experience of what barracks life was like for a soldier in the 1890s and in 1942. Although it's not so hands-on for everyone, apparently. "The Irish can be a bit shy," says Lar Joye, curator of the museum's Soldiers and Chiefsexhibition. "The tourists are usually much more eager to give it a go, but the Irish aren't so sure." Why? "They don't like to embarrass themselves. They need someone to have a go of it first." If they're shy with that, then there's a danger they'll run away from the replica uniforms that they can also try on. There are ammunitions factory overalls, UN peacekeeping shirts and 19th-century jackets, as well as helmets and berets.

When you put on the kind of helmet the Irish Army sported during the second World War, you realise that it sits on your head like a soup bowl and leaves ample room for a bullet or bit of shrapnel to hit your nape and neck. The German helmets were much better, explains Joye, because they covered the whole head and neck. Because they were associated with the Nazis, mimicking them wasn’t the popular thing to do.

The new barracks-life section packs a lot in. Part of the novelty is that visitors get a feel for real military kit. At organised workshops and school tours, they open up boxes that include such items as gas masks, ivory toothbrushes and bullets. It’s utterly engaging, not least because it takes the exhibition out from behind glass.

In the age of interactivity, the trick for every modern museum is to give people an experience of history that is not simply confined to behind glass. That’s not possible with everything in an exhibition such as Soldiers and Chiefs, which has delicate and valuable artefacts including the shirt James Connolly wore when wounded at the GPO and the sword carried by King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. But it already had some novel elements, including interactive touchscreens and mounted guns that visitors can test out.

As we finish up the tour, there’s a family going through their drills with the rifle and the sergeant. They’re Spanish and if they’re not being put off by the Irish language orders, then they’re not likely to be embarrassed at having a go.

See also Frank Miller's audio slideshow at http://www.irishtimes.com/indepth/slideshows/liferoom-collins-barracks-museum/