Hewson has long advocated for a children's museum for Ireland, inspired by a positive experience her daughters had at the Dallas Children's Museum in the mid-1990s. In 2003, plans were announced to build the so-called Exploration Station as part of an overall €500 million Heuston Gate development project near the Dublin Heuston railway station. The children-oriented science centre was to be owned by the Irish Children's Museum charitable trust, established in 2006, with Hewson as a prominent member of the board led by Danny O'Hare. Hewson said, "Seeing as we're nearly the last European country in on it, we can learn from children's museums already up and running and expand on them." However, over the next few years the science centre faced significant cost overruns in the planning stages and a possible European Commission investigation into how the Office of Public Works had handled the awarding of the contract for it. The effects of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 then put a halt to the entire Heuston Gate project. As of August 2016, the site was finally fixed as between Earlsfort Terrace and the Iveagh Gardens, and as of October 2019, the post of CEO was advertised.