The “stolen” skulls of Inishbofin

Tuuli Rantala and Marie Coyne carry the coffin containing the remains of islanders stolen in 1890 (Photo: Ciarán Walsh)

“May they rest in peace forever more”

Marie Coyne made history on Sunday 16 July 2023 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 on the island. They were accompanied by Clare Rishbeth, the great-granddaughter of Alfred Cort Haddon who, 133 years ago to the day, stole the remains of the thirteen islanders being carried in the coffin. The remains were laid to rest under a stone inscribed with the wish “May they rest in peace forever more”.

The women retraced the voyage the remains had taken in 1890 after Haddon stole them from St Colman’s Monastery, smuggled them on to a ship and brought them back to Dublin. Haddon visited the island when he was working as the chief scientific officer on a survey of fishing grounds off the west coast. Arthur J, Balfour asked the Royal Dublin Society to organise on behalf of the British administration in Ireland. The local landlord told Haddon about the skulls and he saw an opportunity to advance his interest in anthropology.

Two years later, he gave the ‘collection’ to Daniel J. Cunningham, TCD’s Professor of Anatomy who had established an Anthropology Department in 1891. They remained there until 11.30am on 12 July 2023, when Marie Coyne and Tommy Burke took custody of the remains in the Anatomy Department on Pearse St. They accompanied the remains to a removal ceremony in the college chapel and then commenced the long journey back to Inishbofin.

It had taken over ten years to get there. The long journey home began with a small photograph in a photograph album Charles R. Browne assembled in 1897 and his daughter gifted to the Manuscript Library in TCD in 1995.  Felicity O’Mahony showed me in 2009 in the aftermath of a very successful project built around John Millington Synge’s photographs of the Aran Islands. The photograph showed a collection of skulls in a niche in the east wall of St Colman’s Monastery. Three years later, the Royal Irish Academy published a paper on Browne’s ethnographic study of the islands in which Browne described how he tried steal more skull but was thwarted by the islanders.

Left. Haddon’s photograph of St Colman’s Monastery showing the skulls in situ in a niche in the bottom right hand corner of the east wall. Haddon included an identical sketch in his journal and both establish the provenance of genuinely “ancient” Irish skulls. Charles R. Browne added the photograph to an album in 1897 when he compile a photographic archive of the Dublin Anthropological Laboratory. Right. Marie Coyne sent  this  photograph to be in 2012, immediately after seeing Haddon’s photo in the exhibition in theNational Museum. It shows St Colman’s Monastery as an active burial ground that served the island community for centuries.

Marie Coyne saw the photograph and read Browne’s story when she visited  the Irish Headhunter exhibition in the National Museum | Country Life in Castlebar. Dáithí de Mórdha, archivist at the Blasket Centre, and I curated the exhibition in 2012 in partnership with the Manuscript Library, The Heritage Council and OPW. The exhibition title was a play on Haddon’s nickname and the plan was to show Browne’s albums in the communities represented as part of a wider exploration of – and reckoning with – the colonial legacies materialised in photograph collections like this.

A typical Anthropometry shot of ‘native’ Irish types: Browne represented the Blasket islanders as anthropological specimens, but Dáithí de Mórdha identified the man in the middle as Tomás Ó Criomhtain who is remembered as An tOileánach, the Islandman. He was a writer and one of the most celebrated figures of the Blasket Island community.

The exhibition opened in the Blasket Centre;  Browne carried out a photographic survey of communities on the main island and Dún Chaoin in 1897. The idea of a ‘headhunter’ operating in Ireland  piqued everyone’s interest and we were asked the same question time and again: where are the skulls in the photograph? We began searching for them after a spokesperson for TCD told RTÉ that the college did not know where the remains were, despite an online catalogue of collections in TCD that contained a detailed description and located them in the Anatomy Museum in the School of Medicine.

The exhibition finished its run in the Haddon Library in Cambridge University in September 2013. It was an opportunity for me to search the Irish component of Haddon’s personal papers in the University Library, most of which looked as if they had never been read since Ethel Fegan and John Pickles catalogued them in the 1970s. Haddon illustrated a graphic account of his theft of the skulls with a sketch based on the photograph in Browne’s album. I found a letter that  confirmed that Haddon gave the collection to TCD in 1892 after he presented a lecture on the craniology of the Aran Islands at the Royal Irish Academy.

One year later, the Royal Irish Academy published Haddon’s study of the skulls he stole from Inishbofin. He described these studies as an unprecedented 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. Haddon had spotted a gap in the anthropological study of a pre-conquest or aboriginal Irish race and seized the opportunity to make his name as an academic anthropologist – the main qualification being an expertise in skull measuring.

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. His papers show that his colleagues began targeting monasteries throughout Ireland, documentary evidence that they knew they were involved in grave robbing.

Haddon described in detail how he and Dixon went to St Colman’s under cover of darkness, selected thirteen skulls, put them in a sack and smuggled them on board the SS Fingal, telling a security guard that the sack contained poteen. Adrian Dixon, grandnephew of A. F. told me that they said it was salmon. In another letter, Haddon’s colleague Ernest Holt, a marine biologist, informed him that Sligo Abbey was full of skulls, but they had to leave them there because place was in the middle of the town and they hadn’t got their cloaks with them. Other letters identified other sites and, although Haddon never followed up on them, they are evidence of his involvement in graverobbing.

Back to 2013 and the question remained: where are all the Inishbofin skulls?

Marie and I were certain they were still in TCD. We confirmed this in 2014 when Siobhán Ward gave me access to the ‘Old’ Anatomy Department. I had emailed her copies of Haddon’s  lantern slides of skulls labelled ‘TCD’. Ward replied with photographs of the original skulls.

As it happened, she had discovered records and equipment used for skull measuring and I was well positioned to put them in context. I visited ‘Old’ Anatomy in May 2014  and l saw the “Skull Passage” for the first time. It 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 plus display cases that hold the department’s Anthropological Collection. Each case has large signs identifying the provenance of the human remains inside.Two shelves of skulls were signed “INISHBOFFIN: HADDON & DIXON” and “ST. FINAN’S BAY, CO. KERRY: HADDON & DIXON. I texted Marie to say that I had found the remains of her ancestors.

The Skull Passage as it looked in 2014.

It was at that point that we discovered that Haddon had stolen the remains of eleven other individuals from monasteries in St Finian’s Bay in Kerry and the Aran Islands. The fishing survey visited both places, but Haddon’s journal is silent on grave robbing in Aran and he wrote the last entry to survive the day before he arrived in St Finian’s Bay.

The labelling is interesting because it says something about the university politics involved. This is Haddon’s collection. Sure, Dixon helped him steal the remains on Inishbofin, but Haddon was the sole author of the craniological studies that followed.

However, Dixon was Cunningham’s protege and replaced him as Professor of Anatomy in 1903. Haddon taught marine biology in the Royal College of Science and the Anatomy Dept in TCD was his best route into a more attractive career in academic anthropology.

Giving Dixon credit may have made it easier to convince Cunningham to recruit Haddon as an anthropologist, but political differences over Home Rule had already caused Cunningham to drop Haddon from any further involvement in anthropology at TCD. Browne got the job instead and ran the Anthropological Laboratory until  Cunningham’s departure in 1903. This meant the end of the Anthropology Dept and its vast collection of human remains was moved into the service corridor in “Old” Anatomy now known as the “Skull Passage”.

 A self portrait after Browne.Left: Ciarán Walsh reconstructs Cunningham’s skull measuring equipment in 2015. Right: Browne poses as an anthropologist in the Dublin Anthropometric Laboratory, TCD in 1897.

It was against this backdrop that I started my doctoral research in ‘Old’ Anatomy in 2015. 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. I thought this would serve as a precedent for Inishbofin. Furthermore, I told Marie that this department manages an anatomy donor programme and has developed a highly regarded ethical approach to handling human remains. I was optimistic, but I was wrong.

In 2017, Joe Duffy of RTÉ began a campaign to have the skeleton of Irish Giant Cornelius Magrath removed from display in the Anatomy Museum and buried.  Duffy argued that the anatomists had drugged a wake party, robbed Magrath’s remains and dissected his body in secret in TCD. My research showed that Magrath had been in the care of the School of Physic (medicine) when he died and the dissection was carried out in plain view. Duffy’s campaign collapsed and Magrath’s skeleton remains on public display.

Brendan holland poses in front of the skeleton of Cornelius Magrath in “old’ Anatomy in 2019.. Holland and Magratth share acromegaly, a condition that causes gigantism. He explored the ethics of publicly displaying the remains of a fellow giant in the BBC documentary The Giant Gene (photo Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie).

Unfortunately, this set a precedent for the Inishbofin remains and it took the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for Old Anatomy to even acknowledge Marie’s request. Floyd’s murder reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter Movement and triggered widespread public protests against colonial era anthropological collections that perpetuated racism.

Six months before, a member of the Old Anatomy Steering Group told me that emphasising the racist nature of the anthropological collections was sensationalist. Widespread support for Black Lives Matter and the spinoff colonial legacies movement showed otherwise. Marie and I had became part of an international movement demanding that universities and museums deal with their colonial legacies. Nevertheless, the Old Anatomy Steering Group still refused to engage with the question of repatriation. That decision perplexed many in TCD, senior members of the Medical School among them.

Provost Paddy Prendergast announced that he was going to engage with the colonial legacies movement and come up with a plan to “decolonise” the campus. We wrote to him proposing that the repatriation – the return for burial – of the Haddon collection would be a good start. Pegi Vail, Cathy Galvin, Pat O’Leary and Padraig Dirrane joined us and we formed a collective called the Haddon Dixon Repatriation Project. 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 deaccession to describe the process of disposing of the remains in the collection, 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 under the banner of archaeology. 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 deaccession of the crania and transfer to the possession of private individuals or historical interest groups” [my emphasis].

A delegation of “private individuals” gathers outside of the Provoost’s Office in the main square in TCD. L-R: Pat O’ Leary, community rep for St Finian’s Bay, Cathy Galvin, poet and repatriation activist, Pegi Vail, anthropologist at NYU and descendant of Inishbofin islanders, and Ciarán Walsh | curator.ie.

We met in the Provost’s office on September 1 and the colonial legacies team seemed to overrule the ‘Old’ Anatomy group when Senior Dean Eoin O’Sullivan confirmed that the repatriation of the entire Haddon collection was being considered. In October, however, ‘Old’ Anatomy forced the colonial legacies team into a compromise and they reneged on the agreement reached at the meeting – TCD  released material in response to a Freedom of Information request submitted by journalist Ken Foxe and this shows clearly when and how ‘Old’ Anatomy moved against the colonial legacies team.

The result was a compromise. The Inishbofin remains alone would be considered pending the outcome of an evidence-based investigation of their theft. That was good and bad news. The good news was that we had extensive documentary evidence that the Inishbofin theft was part an organised campaign of grave robbing. The bad news was that St Finian’s Bay and Aran Islands had been excluded. ‘Old’ Anatomy conceded on Inishbofin because of a proven theft, but used Haddon’s journal as a standard of evidence that justified the exclusion of St Finian’s Bay and Aran Islands and the hundreds of  other sets of remains in the Skull Passage.

The very idea of  evidence became a problem. The evidence-based process TCD announced had little to do with evidence. It was an academic methodology that TCD deployed to restrict any decision on repatriation to academics working for TCD and, naturally, sensitive to the internal divisions stirred up by the threat of decolonisation.

Eventually the penny dropped: TCD was not interested in our evidence. Worse still, historians in the colonial legacies team tailored their evidence to fit the compromise won by ‘Old’  Anatomy. The evidence based process was a way to remove “private individuals or historical interest groups” from the decision making process.

That led to a fractious meeting on Inishbofin in November 2022, at which the colonial legacies team lectured the islanders for almost an hour and seemed startled at the idea that the community and campaigners might challenge their authority and demand an input into the decision making process. The islanders responded with a petition demanding repatriation of the entire collection without condition or delay.

In February 2023, TCD’s board announced its decision to return the Inishbofin skulls as part of a carefully choreographed pr campaign that focussed on the issue of the theft as a rational for deaccessioning that part of the collection. No mention was made of the remains Haddon stole from St Finian’s and the Aran Islands.

It split the campaign because some people felt Inishbofin was a glass-half-full and we should settle for that rather than risk everything. In April, it emerged that board members were not aware of the other half of the collection and this appeared to be rectified in June, when ‘Old’ Anatomy and the colonial legacies team were directed, according to TCD board member Phil Mullins, 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 eventually met community representatives from St Finian’s Bay in 2024, but no contact has been made as yet with reps community in the Aran Islands as far as I know. In the background, the working party tasked with developing ‘Old’ Anatomy has run into problems over the display of contested collections of human in the “Skull Passage”, which is a big central feature of its  plans for a revamped library and museum. That may be why It has adopted a far less antagonistic approach to the community there. Either way, a formal decision on the return for burial of the St Finian’s Bay remains was expected in September 2025, but ‘Old’ anatomy has held off pending further consultation with museum authorities.

So, the funeral on Inishbofin marked the beginning of the end of the saga of the “Stolen Skulls” held in TCD.

A grave was opened at the beginning of July 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 top. It stated “May they rest in peace forever more.”

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).

This part of the story is well covered in the feature Documentary Iarsmaí (Remnants) made by Deaglán Ó Mocháin’s company Dearcán Media for for TG4 and BBC Northern Ireland. Directed by Damien McCann and produced by Rosie McNally, the film will investigate how how Irish and British museums are re-examining collections of empire related material in response to a vigorous public engagement with colonial legacies in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.  The Inishbofin  campaign is one of three stories featured in the film.

To quote Haddon, it would be too tedious for me to write and you to read what happened next, so here is the trailer.

To Be continued.