Addendum to Normalising the Abnormal

In our last blog post, the second of our series on the return of the skulls from Inishbofin, Ciarán Walsh continued the story of the struggles to repatriate the skulls. On 22 February, Trinity College University of Dublin decided to repatriate the thirteen skulls stolen from the island. This may seem like a victory, but Ciarán signals otherwise. He sent us the addendum below.

Ciarán Walsh (curator.ie)

As expected, TCD announced the return of thirteen crania to Inishbofin in a carefully choreographed media campaign that kept everyone’s eyes on Inishbofin while TCD took eleven other stolen skulls off the table and erected a procedural firewall between the university and the colonial legacies movement outside it. 

The Irish Examiner published a useful summary of an advance briefing:  TCD had decided to return the skulls using an evidence-based procedure it had devised, tested and proven worthwhile. This provides a template for a decision on the Berkeley Library and other legacy issues. There was a seemingly perfunctory apology from the provost. The message was clear: colonial legacies would be dealt with on terms set by TCD alone.

The return of the Inishbofin skulls was represented as a grand gesture of restitution that was, to borrow an idea from the time the skulls were stolen, intended to ‘kill repatriation with kindness’.

This clarified a lot for the repatriation project. We thought we had reached a consensus on the repatriation of the entire Haddon-Dixon collection, but the Senior Dean reached a compromise with the School of Medicine in October. They agreed to split the collection, hand over the Inishbofin skulls, retain eleven skulls from the Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay and cancel the repatriation of Māori remains as a precedent.

The academics on the colonial legacies team constructed the evidence accordingly and presented their ‘analysis’ at a meeting on Inishbofin in November. The Senior Dean put the barest outline of his plan to the meeting, and claimed subsequently that TCD had consulted the islanders. It was, we now see, a box-ticking exercise and, given more space, the same argument could be made in relation to the open submission process that followed. 

Nevertheless, the return of the Inishbofin skulls was represented as a grand gesture of restitution that was, to borrow an idea from the time the skulls were stolen, intended to ‘kill repatriation with kindness’.