A major Heritage Council award has made it possible for the museum to acquire Jimmy Deenihan’s remarkable library of North Kerry Literary Trust video recordings of Kerry writers and their associates. Kathy Reynold has gifted Tony Fitzmaurice’s collection of over 26,000 world class social documentary photographs shot in and around Ballybunion in from 1954 on wards. Leo Finucane will gift a collection of material created over an extraordinary career as a filmmaker based in Moyvane.
Kerry Writers’ Museum received €47,750 from the Heritage Council to continue recovering and archiving films shot in rural north Kerry. This funding will enable the museum to develop a viewing library with trained staff to provide free, public access to these and other collections as they are archived and digitised. That places Kerry Writers’ Museum at the forefront of a strategic drive to manage public engagement with archives like this at a local level.
Kerry Writers’ Museum received €47,750 from the Heritage Council to continue recovering and archiving films shot in rural north Kerry. It brings total investment by the Heritage Council in this project – developed by Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie – to almost €100,000 over two years.
A special screening of Leo Finucane’s film Father And Son at Clounmacon Community Centreis a continuation of the community cinema programme and the first act of the second phase of this groundbreaking project (video below).
The 2025 grant allows Kerry Writers’ Museum to complete its acquisition of two very important collections. The first is Jimmy Deenihan’s remarkable library of North Kerry Literary Trust recordings of Kerry writers and their associates. The second is the Tony Fitmaurice collection of photographs, which his niece Kathy Reynoldshas given back to the people of Listowel and Ballybunion.
Heritage Council funding will also enable the museum to develop a viewing library with trained staff to provide free, public access to these and other collections as they are archived and digitised. That places Kerry Writers’ Museum at the forefront of a strategic drive to manage public engagement with archives like this at a local level. The partnership with Leo Finucane and Clounmacon Community Centre is an important part of that project.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage is also a book about photography and it pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. I argue that this led to an experiment in cinematography in the Torres Strait in 1898 and, given his radically anticolonial attitude and subversive intent, these four minutes of film stand as a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology. I also argue against that Haddon’s slideshows about the Aran Islands were a form of anticolonial activism that provided an ethnographic baseline for cultural nationalists like Hyde and literary modernists like Synge. Academic publishing severely limits the scope for photography as an alternative to text and this aspect of Haddon’s work was explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, an exhibition of twenty five photographs at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savageis the first in depth study of Haddon’s contribution to modern anthropology since Alison Hingston Quiggin published her memorial ‘sketch’ of Haddon The Head Hunter in 1942. I reinterpret her title in line with Haddon’s adoption of the persona of an English savage in slideshows he performed with the intention of humanising the victims of colonialism and combatting ethnocentric racism. Unlike Quiggin, I had access to ‘lost’ material from the Aran Islands and I use this to re-evaluate Haddon’s work as an ethnologist in Ireland, a topic usually regarded as irrelevant in the historiography of disciplinary anthropology.
I argue that Haddon, the grandson of anti-slavery activists whose daughters were socialists and feminists, set out to revolutionise anthropology in the 1890s in association with a network of anarcho-utopian activists and philosophers. The result is a painstaking reconstruction of a culture war that divided Anglo-Irish anthropology in the 1890s. That war has been ‘forgotten’ by disciplinary historians who focussed instead on evolutionary science bracketed by race and colonialism. However, it is being replayed in the current stand-off between a humanitarian tradition of engaged anthropology and an academic discipline of political utility that became controversial in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. In short, Haddon’s long battle with a liberal academy provides an interesting perspective on attempts by academics to reposition anthropology within a neoliberal academy.
A Very English Savageis also a book about photography and it pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. I argue that this led to an experiment in cinematography in the Torres Strait in 1898 and, given his radically anticolonial attitude and subversive intent, these four minutes of film stand as a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology. I also argue against that Haddon’s slideshows about the Aran Islands were a form of anticolonial activism that provided an ethnographic baseline for cultural nationalists like Hyde and literary modernists like Synge. Academic publishing severely limits the scope for photography as an alternative to text and this aspect of Haddon’s work was explored in ‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’, an exhibition of twenty five photographs at the RoyalAnthropological Institute in London.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savageis available atBooks Upstairs | Dublin’s Oldest Independent Bookshop.
Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savagehas gone on sale on the Berghahn website with a time-limited discount of 25% available with the code WALS9840.
Iarsmaí features the closing stages of a long campaign to persuade the School of Medicine in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to return for burial the remains of thirteen individuals stolen from the island in 1890. Marie Coyne (Inishbofin Heritage Museum) and Ciarán Walsh (curator.ie) had worked on this project since 2012 and this part of the campaign ended on 16 July 2023 when Coyne brought the remains back to the island.
That was not the end of the story.
The Inishbofin remains were part of a collection of 24 skulls that Haddon and Dixon stole in a grave robbing spree that started in Inishbofin in July 1890 and ended in St Finian’s Bay in Kerry in August 1890. Haddon recorded the theft of the Inishbofin skulls in detail, but he was a sporadic journalist at best and he abandoned his journal before he reached St Finian’s monastery.
However, numerous other records proved that these remains were part of the same haul, which Haddon gifted to the Anatomy Dept in TCD in 1892. The School of Medicine set up the Old Anatomy Museum Working Group to develop the site after the department moved to a new premises in 2014. This group steadfastly refused to engage with the idea of repatriation and used the lack of a journal entry to exclude the remains of eleven individuals from any decision on the repatriation of the collection.
Documents released to Ken Foxe in response to an FOI request reveal how the Old Anatomy Museum Working Group forced the independent Trinity Colonial Legacies project to compromise on this issue. The university further sidelined this project when it formally constituted the Trinity Legacies Review Working Group to implement the terms of that deal. In effect, the internal politics of the university trumped the will to decolonise its campus as college managers attempted to kill repatriation with kindness.
That is the background to the story that Iarmaí tells as part of a wider investigation of how museums and institutions are struggling to respond to demands for the repatriation of looted material, while seeking a way to retain collections that are obviously tainted by colonialism. In the background a government appointed committee is examining the legislative vacuum in which collections that pre-date the foundation of the Irish state exist.
Despite a commitment to include communities of origin in the process, Coyne was excluded while collection management staff from national institutions, academics from TCD and even a representative from the commercial gallery sector were appointed. Sure, that is the way the civil service populate these committees. More alarming still is a determined shift from “communities of origin” to “claimant communities” under the watch of a minister from the Green Party.
So, Iarsmaí is in part a story about a compromise that encapsulates the dilemma faced by colonial era institutions dealing with popular demands for the decolonisation of public spaces under the banner of a resurgent Black Lives Matter Movement. Iarsmaí captures the thrill of that moment well. The untold story is the retention of the other half of the Haddon Dixon Collection by the school of Medicine TCD. That underscores a storyline that moves from an unprecedented public reaction to structural racism to an equivocal commitment to repatriation and a wrenchingly sincere discussion amongst curators about the ethical retention of looted material and stolen skulls, while the final sequence of a funeral on Inishbofin makes a dignified case for the unequivocal resolution of colonial legacies.
The opening of a grave in a community burial ground marks the end of a ten-year campaign seeking the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls’ of Inishbofin. Community representatives will remove the remains of their ancestors from the ‘Old‘ Anatomy Dept at Trinity College, University of Dublin at 11am on Wednesday 12 July and, following a funeral service at noon in the college chapel, will begin the journey home. The burial will take place at 1pm on Sunday 16 July.
Archaeological excavation at St Colman’s Monastery on Inishbofin in preparation for the return and burial of ancestral remains stolen in 1890 and held in the Anatomy Dept TCD since 1892 (photo: Marie Coyne)
The opening of a grave in a community burial ground marks the end of a ten-year campaign seeking the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls’ of Inishbofin. Community representatives will remove the remains of their ancestors from the ‘Old‘ Anatomy Dept at Trinity College, University of Dublin at 11am on Wednesday 12 July and, following a funeral service at noon in the college chapel, will begin the journey home. The burial will take place at 1pm on Sunday 16 July. See www.inishbofin.com for details.
Christopher Day (top) making the coffin in the same way that his great grand uncle James Cunnane (bottom) made coffins in Inishbofin in the 1960’s (photos: Marie Coyne).
This is the first repatriation project of its kind in Ireland and is probably the most important anthropological event since the Harvard Anthropological Mission to the Irish Free State in the 1930s. To begin with, the story of the ‘stolen skulls of Inishbofin’ captured the public imagination in the wake of a resurgent Black Lives Matter Movement and generated extensive media interest in the history of anthropology in Ireland. Furthermore, the controversy triggered a critical engagement with the idea of anthropology at a community level and this will have a major impact on how institutions deal with communities in relation to colonial legacies. For instance, the Colonial Legacies Review Working Group at TCD contested the use of ‘repatriation’ to denote ‘return and burial’ because, ironically, of its unwelcome colonial connotations in an Irish context. The debate that followed clarified important aspects of the legislation governing the retention of human remains, not least (a) the distinction between archaeological and ethnological collections from the colonial era and (b) the automatic right of return for burial in the case of the latter. The controversy also raised serious questions about the ‘evidence based’ methodology employed by the Colonial Legacies Review Working Group, which ultimately had to concede the unconditional right of communities in Inishbofin, Aran Islands and St Finian’s Bay to have ancestral remains returned for burial.
The Inishbofin remains will be buried as close as possible to St Colman’s Monastery, where they rested until Haddon and Dixon stole them in 1890. The site was chosen because of the low risk of disturbing earlier, unmarked burials – the source of the remains – or any settlement associated with the monastery. Nevertheless, archaeologist Franc Miles from Archaeology and Built Heritage supervised the opening of the grave by Ryan Lash, John Burke, John Cunnane, John Michael Coyne, Ryan Coyne and Máirtín Lavelle.
Marie Coyne documented the process in the following slideshow.
