From 1908, under the new directorship of Count George Noble Plunkett, there was an increased emphasis on collecting objects that were "distinctively Irish" across all the museum's divisions. 1922–1988 After Irish independence in 1922, the museum as a whole, now known as the National Museum of Ireland, had to operate on a much-reduced budget, and lost a large part of its exhibition spaces when Leinster House became the seat of the new Irish parliament. It was from this point on that the art and industry division was tasked with collecting objects relating to Irish military and political history. The museum mounted its first exhibition on the Easter Rising in 1932 in Kildare Street, with objects that would form the centre of what would become known as the Easter Week Collection. This was the museum's first contemporary and thematic collection, and this remained an active area of collecting for a large part of the 20th century. Many of the objects in the collection were donated or loaned by members of the public. The 1930s saw the donation of a large and important collection of Asian art by Dublin-born Albert Bender of San Francisco. Bender, who was Jewish, donated the collection to the National Museum of Ireland during the tenure of curator and director Adolf Mahr, who was also the head of the Dublin Nazi chapter. The collection was sought after by a number of other cultural institutions, including the Louvre, but Bender gave the NMI first refusal on it. This was despite the changed remit of the museum under the new Irish Free State, with an aim to concentrate its collecting and interpretation of Irish material culture, and Mahr's attempts to dissuade Bender from donating to the Irish museum, stating: "We are not good enough an institution to be favoured with such magnificent gifts ... why shall we go to the trouble to force such a fine Far East collection ... upon a country which is not yet mature for it?" Despite this, Bender donated elements of his collection from 1932 to 1937 in honour of his mother, Augusta Bender, to whom the exhibition room in Kildare Street was dedicated. The "Augusta Bender Memorial Room of Far Eastern Art" was opened by Eamon de Valera on 25 June 1934, with de Valera delivering a speech written by Mahr. The event was attended by members of the Yeats family and the artist