Culture Shock: Never mind the Nazis. What about Ireland’s own stolen treasures?

The astonishing story of the huge trove of paintings that has emerged from an apartment in Munich makes us think again about loot. The 1,406 works by Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, Renoir, Munch, Dix, Marc and others are stolen property. Either they were seized by the Nazis from museums and collectors or their Jewish owners sold them cheaply under appalling duress. Tracing the rightful owners might be a complex process, but no one is likely to argue with the principle of restitution. Stolen goods must be returned to the descendants of the rightful owners.

But what if I suggested there is an even bigger hoard of stolen art and artefacts sitting unseen in Dublin? This is not a thought experiment. In storage at the Decorative Arts and History division of the National Museum of Ireland, at Collins Barracks in Dublin, is a vast collection of “ethnographic” art. It consists of something of the order of 12,500 objects from the Pacific, the Americas and Africa. This hoard has two similarities to the Munich trove. It has been out of sight for a very long time. And at least a significant amount of it is loot, pure and simple. We have a moral obligation to think carefully about what to do with it.

It doesn’t take much moral courage to say that the Nazis were bad and that their pillaging of art collections, first in Germany and then around Europe, was of a piece with their wider criminality. It is particularly easy to be certain about this in Ireland, which remains at a safe distance from any fallout. But it is striking that there is almost no public discussion about what the moral obligations of the State may be in relation to material in its own possession that it knows to be stolen.

Last year, when I was completing the History of Ireland in 100 Objects project, I deliberately chose an apparently anomalous object: a very beautiful reclining Buddha that is on display at Collins Barracks. It has a resonance in Irish literature: both Leopold and Molly Bloom mention it in Ulysses. But it is as much a piece of loot as anything in the Munich hoard. It was stolen from a Buddhist temple in Burma by Col Sir Charles FitzGerald, on a punitive imperial expedition in 1885-6. FitzGerald donated it, and other Burmese statues that are still in storage, to the museum in 1891.

I am not suggesting that all the 12,500 objects in the “ethnographic” collection are so obviously stolen. Many were “collected”, albeit in unequal exchanges. Much of the Pacific material comes from Capt James Cook’s epic voyages, and was probably not taken by force. What is thought to be one of the most interesting individual collections, 46 objects sent from Sierra Leone by the surgeon Brian O’Beirne in 1824, probably falls into the same category. The origins of more material, presumably, lies in the grey area between trade and coercive acquisition: an expansive terrain in imperial relations.

But there are unquestionably many objects that, like FitzGerald’s Buddha, were acquired by outright violence. Most of the material the museum acquired in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was donated by Irish soldiers or administrators in the colonial service. In some cases objects come literally from the battlefield as trophies of war. The labels that were on display until the 1970s describe, for example, “Cetewayo’s kilt . . . captured by Major McCalmont during the pursuit of the Zulu king”. Cetewayo is as crucial a figure in Zulu history as Michael Collins is in Irish. Many of the New Zealand objects were collected during the brutal so-called Maori Wars in the 1860s. They were donated by two Irish officers, Surgeon William Goode and ColJohn Dwyer.

A substantial component comes from the Solomon Islands. It was "collected" by Arthur Mahaffy, son of the famous provost of Trinity College Dublin. Mahaffy was there not to study culture but to recruit a force to suppress "head-hunting" raids. Offending villages were burned, and Mahaffy "liberated" their goods as trophies. In Exhibit Ireland: Ethnographic Collections in Irish Museums, Rachel Hand has noted that his original labels on the objects donated to Dublin make no bones about their origins. Shell rings and ornamented whales' teeth are described as "part of the loot from Nusaru in the Rubiana Lagoon". Another decorated object was "taken from the inside of the house of Zito, chief of Biloa on Vella Lavella, destroyed by me in October 1901". A fetish from Nigeria is listed as "taken from the house of a superior class at Lagos".

What should be done with this material? Firstly, it needs to be displayed. Most of it has been in storage since 1979. In 2007 the government announced funding for a new wing at Collins Barracks specifically to house the ethnographic collections. As that’s not now likely to happen for quite some time, there’s a need at least for a temporary exhibition that aims to provoke public debate and awareness.

We also need an independent survey of the collection to determine, even in a preliminary way, what was looted and what was legitimately acquired. And when we know what was stolen we should begin, over time, to give it back.

fotoole@irishtimes.com