Ms Lynn Scarff:

I thank Senator Warfield for his questions. As Ms Heaney said, during the past two weeks we have had the Mother Summer Block Party. We have had Alison Lowry in doing a piece of work and some filming on music in Clarke Square on Sunday. The time is ripe for our cultural institutions to be used as spaces of the public realm where arts and culture are going on continuously.

I will address the Senator’s last question on decolonisation and repatriation. Our board ratified a statement on the NMI's policy on that issue at our last meeting of our full board last June. I would be happy to send that on to the Senator in full for him to read through it. He raised the issue of what resources we need. There is still a great deal of research to be done on the objects in our collections from a provenance perspective, particularly our ethnographic collection, and we are very much committed to that. The key element for us is communication and dissemination of that collection in order that other communities around the world are aware of what we hold and why we hold it. It is part of a larger decolonisation question and process for our museum, on which we are working with a number of our peers.

On the Senator's question about a national policy, it is important there is one. Both Dr. White and Ms O'Kelly from the Irish Museums Association have brought this up and there is a discussion at a national level on that. The Heritage Council would potentially, because of its role in the museum standards programme of Ireland, be a good home to drive that forward. Generally, there is a strong consensus on examining that. I imagine we will see something emerging in the coming months. That overall message we want to get across to the committee today is that the pandemic has shown there is a commitment to collaboration across the museum sector in Ireland - across our national cultural institutions, local museums, independent museums and historical sites. Thinking of ways that can be built on and policies that nurture that is where we need to go. As Ms Heaney said, we are moving very much forward and taking new steps, building on what we have learned and the opportunities that were created.