'May they rest in peace forever more': How the Inishbofin skulls finally made it home

The remains of 13 people, which were stolen in 1890, were returned to the island last Sunday, but it has been a 10-year journey to make that happen, writes Ciarán Walsh

Fri, 21 Jul, 2023 - 14:54

Ciarán Walsh

“May they rest in peace forever more”

Marie Coyne made history last Sunday when she lifted a coffin onto her shoulder and carried it part of the way to the burial ground on Inishbofin Island.

Accompanied by Bridget Cunnane, Veronica Cunnane and Tuuli Rantala, these women became the first female “four” to be given the honour of carrying a coffin in the traditional procession from church to grave. They were followed by Clare Rishbeth, the great-granddaughter of Alfred Cort Haddon who, 133 years ago to the day, stole the remains of 13 islanders being carried in the coffin.

The women were retracing the voyage the remains had taken in 1890 after Haddon and Andrew Francis Dixon stole them from St Colman's Monastery, smuggled them on to a ship and brought them back to Dublin. Haddon gave the “collection” to TCD in 1892 and they remained there until 11.30am on July 12, 2023, when Marie Coyne and Tommy Burke took custody of the remains in the Anatomy Department on Pearse St.

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Following a removal ceremony in the college chapel, they began the long journey back to Inishbofin. It has taken 10 years or so to get there.

It began with a small photograph in an album in the Manuscript Library in TCD, which Felicity O'Mahony showed me in 2009. It pictured a collection of skulls in a niche in the east wall of St Colman's Monastery. Subsequent research revealed that Haddon included a sketch of this photograph in a graphic account of the theft of the same skulls.

Marie Coyne saw the photograph in an exhibition Dáithí de Mórdha and I curated in 2012 in partnership with the library. We began searching for the remains after a spokesperson for TCD told RTÉ that the college did not know where the remains were, despite an online catalogue that contained a detailed description of them.

A search of Haddon's papers in Cambridge confirmed that he gave the collection to TCD after a lecture on the craniology of the Aran Islands at the Royal Irish Academy. He followed this with a study of the skulls from Inishbofin in 1893.

He described these studies as an attempt to discover the origins of the so-called “Irish Race”, the theory being that variations in skull form evolved and became characteristic as migrating populations settled in an area and remained undisturbed for many generations.

The islands off the west coast provided Haddon with the perfect research site. William Wilde, father of Oscar, wrote that monasteries in the Aran Islands were the best source of ancient Irish skulls. Haddon discovered in Inishbofin that communities placed skulls uncovered during burials in mediaeval monasteries for safekeeping and his papers show that his colleagues began targeting monasteries throughout Ireland.

These records leave no doubt that they knew they were involved in graverobbing. Haddon described in detail how he and Dixon went to St Colman's under cover of darkness, selected 13 skulls, put them in a sack and smuggled them on board the SS Fingal, telling a security guard the sack contained poteen.

We were certain these skulls were still in TCD. We confirmed this in 2014, when I was given access to the Old Anatomy Department and saw the “Skull Passage” for the first time. This is a long service corridor that runs behind the anatomy theatre and links the original dissection room to the Anatomy Museum.

One side of the corridor is lined with two-metre high display cases that hold the department's Anthropological Collection. Each case has large signs identifying the provenance of the human remains inside and two shelves of skulls were signed “INISHBOFFIN: HADDON & DIXON” and “ST. FINAN'S BAY, CO. KERRY: HADDON & DIXON.

It was at that point that we discovered that the pair had stolen the remains of 11 other individuals from monasteries in St Finian's Bay and the Aran Islands.

Unfortunately, Haddon stopped writing his journal the day before he arrived in St Finian's Bay. This became a major sticking point in our attempts to have the entire collection returned for burial. The Old Anatomy Steering Group manages the collection and insisted that proof of theft was the only basis on which any application for return for burial might be considered.

That came as a surprise. I started my doctoral research in Old Anatomy in 2015 and Marie emailed me asking me — with characteristic directness — to tell Old Anatomy that “we want to bury our ancestors in Bofin”. I assured her that TCD had “behaved ethically in relation to other human remains”, a reference to the repatriation of Māori remains in 2009 that I thought would serve as a precedent for Inishbofin.

Furthermore, this department manages an anatomy donor programme and has developed a highly regarded ethnical approach to handling human remains. I was optimistic, but I was wrong. It took the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for Old Anatomy to even acknowledge Marie's request.

Floyd's murder mobilised the Black Lives Matter Movement and triggered widespread public protests against colonial era anthropological collections that perpetuated racism. Up to that point the Old Anatomy Steering Group had refused to engage with the question of repatriation.

After that point, we became part of an international movement demanding that universities and museums deal with their colonial legacies. Pegi Vail and Cathy Galvin joined us and we formed a collective called the Haddon Dixon Repatriation Project.

In 2020, Provost Paddy Prendergast announced his plan to engage with the movement and “decolonise” the TCD campus. We wrote to him proposing that the repatriation of the Haddon Dixon collection would be a good start.

He responding quickly, stating that he had consulted the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Head of the School of Medicine and they supported fully “the idea that any crania held by Trinity College that can be identified as coming from Inishbofin should be returned; recognising that this requires utmost care and sensitivity.”

No mention was made of St Finian's Bay or the Aran Islands and this was the first sign of trouble. The second was TCD's insistence on using de-accession to describe the process, thereby rejecting repatriation and its association with the colonial legacies movement. De-accession, incidentally, is a technical term used by museum managers to describe the process of selling off parts of a collection to fund the acquisition of new material.

This came as a shock because it simultaneously objectified and commodified human remains. It also signalled a strategy that treated the Haddon Dixon collection as archaeological specimens and used the formal authority of the university as the basis for the retention of the remains.

Nevertheless, negotiations continued with the Provost's office, but little progress was made until September 2022, when we set up a meeting with Provost Linda Doyle and her colonial legacies team.

Old Anatomy set out its position two weeks in advance of the meeting. The group concluded that the School of Medicine was “not in a position to support a request for de-accession of the crania and transfer to the possession of private individuals or historical interest groups”. The colonial legacies team seemed to overrule them when Senior Dean Eoin O'Sullivan confirmed that the repatriation of the entire Haddon Dixon collection was being considered.

In October, however, the colonial legacies team reached a compromise with Old Anatomy under which the return of the Inishbofin remains alone would be considered pending the outcome of an evidence-based investigation of their theft. It soon became apparent that this was a strategy designed to remove “private individuals or historical interest groups” from the decision-making process.

That led to a fractious meeting on Inishbofin in November in which the islanders responded with a petition demanding repatriation without condition or delay. Nevertheless, everyone engaged with “evidence-based” process even though we felt we were being made jump through hoops. The board announced its decision to return the Inishbofin skulls in February and planning commenced for a funeral on Inishbofin.

In April, it emerged that board members were not aware of the other half of the collection and this was rectified in June, when Old Anatomy and the colonial legacies team were directed, according to Phil Mullins, a board member, to follow through on a “verbal commitment to honour communities' voices” and take “seriously the need for people to bury their ancestors in their ancestral burial grounds”.

Old Anatomy met community representative from St Finian's Bay but no contact has been made as yet with the Aran Islands.

Nevertheless, the funeral on Inishbofin marks the beginning of the end of this saga. A grave was opened two weeks ago in the new part of the cemetery, the risk of disturbing burials in the older part being too great.

To the accompaniment of keener Caitríona Ní Cheannabháin and musician Eoin Mac Casarlaigh, the islanders lowered the coffin, covered it with straw and filled the grave with soil, placing a layer of sea-rounded white stones on top. A memorial stone was laid on these. It stated “May they rest in peace forever more.”

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Ciarán Walsh is a freelance curator and historian of Anglo-Irish anthropology. His book Alfred Cort Haddon: a very English savage will be in the shops in the second week of September.