A plan to remove objects with a violent, colonial past from the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) has slowed to a crawl as the provenance of more than 15,000 items requires investigation.
In 2023, then minister for arts Catherine Martin established a group to advise the Government on how to deal with “culturally sensitive” items in Irish collections, including pieces in national museums.
The plan was to develop guidelines on how to handle artefacts that may have been illegally or unethically traded.
The advisory group submitted an interim report to Minister for Culture Patrick O’Donovan earlier this year, but it has not yet been published.
RM Block
Amid fresh political focus on the need to decolonise art collections in the State, the National Museum of Ireland also began a process of identifying parts of its legacy collections that “do not reflect contemporary collecting practices or ethics”. It appointed a curator of world collections in 2022.
“It has been identified that, due to the scale and complexity of the collection (over 15,000 objects), additional expertise will also be required to support work on the collection, with a particular focus on carrying out the required provenance work on each object within the collection to more fully understand how it came to the National Museum of Ireland,” said a spokesman.
“The NMI regularly, as capacity allows, engages with researchers, communities and countries globally with an interest in world collections, facilitating visits and sharing knowledge of the collections.”
It said it had nothing to add in advance of the Government-appointed advisory committee completing its work.
The advisory committee conducted a study of cultural heritage collections in Ireland last year.
This included items held by cultural and educational institutions, local authorities and trusts.
It found that a third of institutions had carried out provenance research on between 1 and 20 per cent of their collection. Only 13 per cent of institutions had conducted such research on most or all of their collections.
More than a fifth of institutions reported having received a claim or a request for the return of an item in their collection.
Most of the claims related to an item donated or loaned over the last decade, but a “small number” concerned “claims for repatriation from foreign states”.
