ART: Revolving doors at Russborough
How the Irish Republic is subsidising art theft
Visitors to the BBC’s online arts page this Monday morning were confronted with a strange sight. Of the three ‘top’ stories, numbers one and three were illustrated with identical images of the façade of Russborough House. It’s a striking façade (if not a very good photograph), and indeed Russborough – in Co. Wicklow, not far from Dublin – is an austerely handsome building. In a saner world, Russborough would be known for this, and for the marvellous collection of paintings which its late owner, Conservative MP and South African diamond magnate Sir Alfred Beit bequeathed to the Irish Republic. Instead, however, Russborough has achieved an unenviable notoriety with a record of four major art robberies – adding up to the theft of 44 individual works – in 27 years. Thus it was that on Monday morning, the BBC news website carried two contrasting Russborough stories. One happily announced that last Thursday, two stolen works had been ‘found’ in Dublin. The other, less happily, pointed out that a mere three days later, five more pictures had been stolen from Russborough. Two of these, in fact – Jacob van Ruisdael’s The Corn Field and Rubens’s Portrait of a Dominican Monk – had been stolen before, in 1986, before being ‘returned’ seven years later. But other than speculating that Sunday’s raid had been carried out by ‘a former associate of the late Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, nicknamed the General, who is believed to have carried out the 1986 raid’ the BBC displayed a striking lack of curiosity about this odd story.
And on the face of it, this really is odd. Why should the same criminal gang keep stealing pictures from the same house, when these only end up being ‘returned’ or perhaps ‘found’ in improbable corners of Dublin? To do so once would be eccentric enough – four times looks like stupidity of a very tall order. Add to this all the other collections – private as well as public – that are relieved of the odd blue-chip picture in the course of a year and the story looks even stranger. And how do the police come to ‘find’ the missing paintings? It conjures up a delightful picture of a sort of gardai Bernard Berenson figure charming his way into run-down suburban semis in the hope of authenticating the odd Bellotto or two before settling down to tea ...
Delightful, perhaps, but implausible. The truth is much uglier. It is likely that a ‘finder’s fee’ – the Irish Sunday Independent suggests up to EU 300,000 – was paid to someone who could tell the puzzled gardai, Interpol and the FBI where two of the missing paintings from the 1986 raid were to be found. And who would be in a position to know such a thing? The gang responsible for stealing them, obviously. And who would pay to get these paintings back? Since the paintings in the Alfred Beit Collection are ‘in the care’ of the Irish Republic, and in particular the National Gallery of Ireland – and since they are the only ones out of pocket from the theft of these works – one might hazard a guess that this payment came from the Irish government itself. And if this is true, it means that the Irish Republic is, quite simply, funding organised crime.
Now, I have some sympathy with private collectors – the case of the Marquess of Bath and his stolen Titian is a case in point – who resort to paying off criminals in order to recover stolen pictures. It’s a paler form of the sort of limited sympathy extended to desperate people who pay ransom demands in order to recover family members from the hands of kidnappers. It would be better overall if no one ever did this, but on the other hand, it is hard to blame those who do, particularly in the context of lacklustre policing. The only humane response is to cross one's fingers and hope never to have to make this sort of decision oneself.
But for a government to pay criminal gangs for the return of art works really is wickedness of the highest order. Gangs like that of the late Martin Cahill don’t just steal pictures – they engage in every possible form of criminal racketeering, intimidation and violence, including murder. Their activities are thoroughly interconnected with those of terrorist organisations. The criminals steal these pictures not to sell them – that Gainsborough recovered the other day is far too famous ever to find a buyer – but to get cash for them in precisely this sort of transaction. Nor does it matter if these men are 'only' receiving ten per cent or so of the notional price of these paintings. Paying them off encourages further art theft, with results that were pretty clear last Sunday. Worse still, however, it tends to consecrate organised crime as a legitimate competitor to the nation state – or, rather, to blur the line between the two more than is really becoming, even by the standards of this particular example of the statehood.
And if we accept that a sufficient degree of collusion exists between organised crime and the security forces to allow them to coordinate these sorts of cash-for-pictures swaps, why should we assume it stops there? Why is it so easy to keep robbing Russborough? And why are no arrests ever made? Or – to put it another way – wouldn’t it be easier just to give up on security and simply install revolving doors at Russborough – or, better still, to make out a standing order mandate to the relevant Dublin gang and save the wear and tear on some fine old canvasses?
All of which raises one final but pertinent question. Why does the media – and in particular, the BBC – show so little curiosity regarding the logical linkage between the two recent Russborough stories? Perhaps nothing sinister is afoot. Both the Alfred Beit Foundation and the Irish National Gallery have denied that any sort of fee has been paid with respect to the recovery of their paintings – although one can well imagine why they might make such denials even if payments had indeed been made, since anything else would be tantamount to hanging up a banner on the front of every Irish public art collection saying ‘thieves welcome here’. But does the BBC care about this? Evidently not. Don’t ask, don’t tell – that’s the order of the day. Such transactions, after all, depend upon discretion and denial if important public institutions and the people who run them are to avoid embarrassment, and the BBC seems more than glad to help. Silence, then, is the result – a silence that is as predictable as it is culpable.
Bunny Smedley, October 2, 2002 01:53 PM