"Like the Dennis Grant King collection that was refused by the NT and ended up car boot sales around Devizes?
or the Colonel Hawley Stonehenge excavations collection which was house cleared in Bath last year and ended up on Ebay?"

Well, that's what the heroes do, scratch around for instances of cock ups or wrongdoing by individual "archies" in the hope of giving the impression that their own activities are no worse. One is even compiling a "dossier". But so far as I can judge the respective impacts are totally different in scale.

When you can show me that 8,000 archaeologists have been out in the fields eroding the common resource solely for personal gratification or financial gain every weekend for the past three decades and not a single molecule of what they've found has ever ended up in a museum or even been revealed to the rest of us I'll start to think there's some sort of equivalence.

Until then I'll continue to think what's imprisonable in Ireland isn't heroic or even marginally acceptable in Britain. Which other type of mass thieving and vandalism gets endorsed by the government?