Relatives of Omey islanders have renewed their appeal for a return of bones taken by the State in an emergency excavation three decades ago.
As The Sunday Times reports, a professor of archaeology has been contacted about human remains removed from Omey off Claddaghduff in Connemara in 1992, which residents have campaigned for years to be returned.
The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage said last week that it had approached Tadhg O’Keeffe, a University College Dublin professor, to discuss his excavation on the Co Galway tidal island and “the matter of the burials in the context of the local interest”.
It told the newspapers it has received “a suite of technical reports” from O’Keeffe. The documents will be reviewed by the National Monuments Service and National Museum of Ireland.
The department said the remains analysed so far dated from the early medieval period and Bronze Age, “not to recent burials”.
Maggie Coohill, whose father was born on Omey, said: “Islanders were told in the early 1990s that these bones would be returned. They didn’t expect they would still be waiting 30 years later.”
Conservation expert Deirdre McDermott said she had been asked to pursue the issue on behalf of Cleggan Claddaghduff Community Council.
She is a local resident and former president of the Irish national committee of International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), and involved in its working group on rights-based approaches.
“Omey is an important site, with burials there straddling two millennia, but the local community supported an emergency archaeological dig and removal in good faith, on the understanding the bones would be reinterred in due course,” she said.
“Even as recently as 2019, the UNESCO World Heritage Operational Guidelines were changed to acknowledge community participation, and rights,”McDermott said.
Prof O’Keeffe said the return of the material was in the hands of the State’s chief archaeologist Michael McDonagh.
O’Keeffe also said that the first paper in a planned series of five articles outlining the results of the research had been published in the Journal of the Galway Historical and Archaeological Society.
Asked if the community had been informed, he said both he and McDonagh had discussed producing a small booklet on the island’s archaeology when the last or second last scientific paper has been published.
Read more in The Sunday Times here