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.

Source: http://www.news.myanmaronlinecentre.com/2013/11/09/culture-shock-never-mind-the-nazis-what-about-irelands-own-stolen-treasures/