Seven years ago John Hunt jnr (39), and his sister, Trudy, set about giving away one of the world's last great private art and archaeological collections valued at £50 million, which was part of their family fortune. It included a small bronze horse by Leonardo da Vinci, a Greek silver coin revered since the Middle Ages as one of the biblical thirty pieces of silver, a personal seal of Charles 1 of England, as well as works by Picasso and Gauguin.
Their parents, John and Gertrude Hunt, were art collectors and, through their expertise, scholarship and energy between the 1930s-1970s, they gathered a collection of up to 2,000 rare artefacts.
After some years as an archaeologist at Lough Gur, Co Limerick, John Hunt snr and his wife moved to Howth in 1956. John jnr was born a year later and remembers "when every room in the house was full of priceless objects". John finished school at Glenstal, Co Limerick, and completed a degree in history of art and archaeology in UCD in 1979. Then, he said, "I went out into the real world of art." He worked as Arts Council visual arts and film officer, then formed his own transport company and moved the whole Arts Centre circus to galleries throughout the country. He became director of the Temple Bar Gallery and Studio in 1988 but resigned two years later to be custodian of his parents' collection.
In the early 1970s, the Government refused the £50 million gift. "There was nowhere to put the collection." Dr Edward Walsh, president of the University of Limerick, offered to house half the collection on the campus and it went on display in 1978, two years after John Hunt snr died.
The 18th-century Customs House in Limerick was restored and extended at a cost of £3 million and opened last February as a permanent home for the Hunt Collection, which was formally accepted by the Government on behalf of the people of Ireland.
John Hunt and his wife, Patricia, have three children, Jack (7), Paddy (6), and Miriam (4).