The difficulty of establishing clear ownership of antiques offered for sale was highlighted recently when a Dublin auction house unexpectedly had to withdraw a number of items. Late last month, Hamilton Osborne King dropped some 25 lots from a fine art auction at the RDS after it was claimed that at least some of them had been stolen five years ago from the home of an antiques collector.

If this claim proves correct, the items in question will have to be returned to their original owner. In Ireland, as in Britain, an object which has been stolen and then recovered remains the possession of the injured party, no matter who may have paid to buy it in the interim.

According to Hamilton Osborne King's Sara Kenny, the items withdrawn from the sale were sent to the auction house "from a respectable firm of solicitors. We were instructed to sell the items on behalf of their clients. Obviously if we had had any hint that they'd been suspected stolen property, we would have had nothing to do with them."

The problem could have arisen at any auction house in the State. As Stuart Cole of James Adam & Sons commented this week, although stolen items turning up for sale here is not a common occurrence, "this kind of thing can happen to anyone".

Before accepting items for sale, all auction houses require vendors to sign a document confirming legitimacy of ownership, and with rare exceptions this ensures no problems subsequently arise. "We would tend to vet clients as carefully as possible, in so far as we can," Mr Cole confirms. "But you have to take everyone on their bona fides."

Both he and Ms Kenny stressed the importance of registering stolen items as quickly as possible in order to forestall the likelihood of their subsequent appearance at auction. This does not seem to have been the case with the lots removed from the Hamilton Osborne King sale. The original owner never informed organisations specialising in tracking stolen antiques of his loss and rediscovered one of his pieces only because it appeared on the auction catalogue's cover.

Many owners, however, take advantage of the services available to help recover antiques taken by burglars. Among these is the specialist art and antiques unit run by the Garda at Harcourt Street.

Set up in response to the increase in such thefts, for the past two years this has had three full-time staff. Among the unit's main activities are liaising with Garda stations throughout the State and co-ordinating their modus operandi in this field, keeping a central register of all artworks reported stolen and staying in close contact with overseas organisations and police forces.

The last of these is especially important since the majority of art and antiques stolen in Ireland rapidly leaves the country. The market here is so small and its principal players so well known to one another that illegally-acquired goods cannot be introduced without exciting interest. "Criminals are not stupid," Mr Cole remarks. "They don't put items up for auction in the country where they've been stolen."

Burglars here tend to ship goods quickly across the Irish Sea where they can soon be sold on to members of the legitimate antiques trade without any questions being asked. According to Mr Martin Bernon, secretary of the Council for the Protection of Irish Heritage Objects, "the people who do these burglaries are very skilled. They have a fabulous network through which they can distribute stolen objects usually to the UK and from there into the Benelux countries and beyond if necessary."

A voluntary organisation, the council was set up some six years ago after a serious spate of country-house burglaries. It now has between 200 and 250 members and, explains Mr Bernon. "We keep a list of what is stolen and from whom and try to match this with items recovered both here and in the UK. We have been successful in a number of instances."

Both the council and the Garda Siochana liaise with two professional British organisations which seek to track down stolen antiques, Trace and the Art Loss Register.

A former policeman, Mr Jim Hill of Trace, explains that the company has a large database of goods reported as stolen. These entries are then cross-referenced with sale catalogues received by up to 600 auction houses in Britain and Ireland.

Clients pay a fee to have their stolen item(s) featured on the Trace database for a period of 12 years. When the description of such an item matches that of one offered for sale by an auction house, "our computer automatically locks on to this and prints out the information". Mr Hill will then carry out his own check, and if it seems that a lot being sold may have been stolen, Trace informs the local police.

Like everyone involved in this area, Jim Hill notes "there has been a marked increase in the number of items coming from Ireland to the UK. London is the best international market for antiques, and so that's where the highest prices are offered."

The number of Irish people paying to have their stolen goods included in Trace's database has accordingly increased. Mr Hill reports one recent case where a house in the west of Ireland was ransacked. "Within a week, we had found an item from that house up for sale in the UK." He stresses the importance of registering lost property as quickly as possible.

SO, too, do Stuart Cole of Adam's and Hamilton Osborne King's Sara Kenny. Good documentation, including a thorough written description and photographs of each item, provides the best assistance when seeking to recover stolen goods. An up-to-date insurance valuation and exact measurements are also valuable. Mr Cole advises that this information should be kept in a safe, and separate, place. He cites instances where the documentation was stored in the item taken by burglars, leaving the owners with nothing to show the Garda.

Some items are more easily traced than others. A painting, for example, because of its highly distinctive and individual appearance, may be identified without difficulty. The most problematic antiques to recover are pieces of 19th-century mahogany furniture, simply because so many of them look alike, and distinguishing between one chair or desk and another can prove a considerable challenge.

As antique-collecting becomes more popular, especially in Ireland's thriving economy, the threat of burglary is likely to increase. On the other hand there are now more organisations and assistance available to the victims of such theft, and the possibility of stolen items being recovered has also increased. That recovery does not usually occur when antiques turn up at auction, and the likelihood of this happening again in the near future is slight.