Following the visit of researchers from the participating Flemish universities to Swansea in the autumn of 2025, Prof Tomás Irish was invited to join the network and to visit KU Leuven to further his interest in cultural heritage and reparations. Tomás made the trip in late March 2026 and spent a week in Leuven where he was hosted by Pieterjan Deckers and met with colleagues who work in the university library and have responsibility for different university collections, as well as the university archives. He also met with representatives of Blue Shield Belgium.

The university library at KU Leuven is significant because of its history; it was burned down by the advancing German army in August 1914 and its collections were destroyed. The focus of Tomás’ time in Leuven was to learn more about how the library and its collections were rebuilt after the war and how different communities engage with both the library and its collections in the present. Of particular importance in this story is a set of plaster casts which were sent to Leuven from German museums in the 1920s as a reparation payment and which now form part of the university’s Didactic Museum.

Tomás had an incredibly fruitful visit which culminated in the delivery of a lecture on Thursday 2 April to the Leuven Archaeological Research Seminar series (LARS) entitled ‘Cultural Destruction, Restitution and Reparations during and after the First World War: The Archaeological Collections of KU Leuven.’