Hunt Museum - Controversy

Controversy

In December 2003, the Simon Wiesenthal Center alleged in a letter to President Mary McAleese that the museum's collection contained items looted by the Nazis during the Second World War, although the letter did not refer to any specific items in the collection. The museum has denied the claims.

An inquiry led by former Supreme Court judge Donal Barrington was set up by the museum, but its members resigned in February 2005, saying that the museum's funding made an independent inquiry impossible, and requesting a more appropriate inquiry be created. The Department of Arts then provided €150,000 in funding for a second inquiry led by former civil servant Seán Cromien, under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy. The second inquiry was due to submit an interim report to the Royal Irish Academy in November 2005. This was submitted in February 2006. In October 2005, the museum published a catalogue of its exhibits on the internet, providing full details of all the items in its collection. In June 2006, the inquiry submitted the final report, which was published on the Academy's website.

Also in June 2006, a one-day conference took place on the theme of Contested Cultural Property and Museums: The Case of the Hunt Museum. At this conference, a message was conveyed from Shimon Samuels, who had sent the original letter to Mary McAleese questioning why he had not been invited to the seminar. Later, the terms of reference of the Hunt Museum Evaluation Group were questioned, the Simon Wiesenthal Center believing that more emphasis should have been placed on investigating the purported Nazi links of the Hunt family and the Hunt Museum Evaluation Group believing that this lay beyond their terms of reference, which were to do with provenance research. The Royal Irish Academy issued a press release responding to the statement of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Resolution

A 2007 report from American expert Lynn Nicholas, published by the Royal Irish Academy following three years of investigation, called the Wiesenthal Center's allegations "unprofessional in the extreme."

Nicholas found that the Wiesenthal Center had misidentified names in the letters.

"The name used, four times in one letter, is Buhl, not Buhrle, and the individual described, an unreliable dealer who sells forgeries, certainly bears no resemblance to the extremely rich collector and armaments manufacturer Emil Buhrle," the report said.