Three years ago, in the summer of 2023, the Irish government formed a committee to advise museums and other cultural institutions on matters related to restitution and repatriation. That endeavor, known as the Advisory Committee on the Restitution and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage, presented its final report last month.
According to The Art Newspaper, the report aims to address the “practical and legal impediments” that can prevent some institutions from properly responding to claims, whether related to colonial-era artifacts or cultural property looted during the Nazi regime. Therefore, the government should establish a national advisory panel to oversee such claims, along with funding to address impediments like limited provenance research, incomplete cataloguing and digitization of records, and a lack of access to specialists.
The report conducted a national survey of cultural heritage and presented some sobering key findings. Ninety percent of Irish institutions lack comprehensive online catalogs; many have large documentation backlogs, and only a small fraction of their collections are digitized. Few are accessible online. The committee recommends funding earmarked to improve this, along with professional support. A related problem is the lack of provenance expertise; only 23 percent of institutions employ staff members trained in provenance research. When research projects are completed, they are rarely shared with the public.
The committee, chaired by Donnell Deeny (also the co-chair of the UK Spoliation Advisory Panel, which was formed to resolve Nazi-era claims against UK national collections), recommends a two-phased approach. Phase one entails establishing an evidence base on the state of current collections and their operational needs, and phase two involves legislation empowering the culture minister (currently Patrick O’Donovan) to act on the panel’s expert advice in order to “facilitate fair and just outcomes.”
