Remains of 13 residents, stolen in 1890, reinterred on the island of Inishbofin

Inishbofin (Inis Bó Finne) is a small island off the coast of Connemara, County Galway, Ireland. Under cover of darkness on 16 July 1890 academics Alfred Cort Haddon and Andrew Francis Dixon removed partial skeletal remains of 13 people. They were taken for the purposes of studying craniometry and had remained on display or in storage at Trinity College in Dublin since that time. It is thought the remains date from the mid-16th to mid-17th centuries, with the oldest dated to around 1550. Today, following a lengthy campaign by islanders and exactly 133 years after they were taken, the stolen remains were reinterred on Inishbofin. 

Following the campaign for their return, on February 2023, the provost of Trinity College, Dr Linda Doyle, apologised for the upset caused by the university's possession of the remains. They were returned to a delegation of island residents on 12 July 2023, They were taken back to Inishbofin last evening and brought to St Colman's Church, where they laid in repose overnight. Islanders had prepared a burial plot for the coffin in the shadow of the ruins of the church from which their predecessors were taken. The remains were reinterred following a funeral mass this afternoon. Inishbofin resident Marie Coyne, said: "To steal human remains, was wrong to start with. This is our island. They're our people, and they shouldn't be kept in a cabinet, you know, in Trinity, they were resting here and should have been left here, but they didn't get that chance. Now, they deserve to get that chance." 

Image: Stolen remains were reinterred on the island of Inishbofin. Photograph courtesy of RTÉ.