The Heritage Council of Ireland has promoted and funded a wide range of schemes to help conserve the nation’s many legacies and reach out to the wider public.
The Heritage Council of Ireland has been in existence in its present form since 1995 and has promoted and funded a wide range of schemes to help conserve the nation’s many legacies and reach out to the wider public. The latest of these is the not very widely known but ambitious Historic Towns Initiative (HTI), which provides up to eighty per cent funding to local authorities and owners, to revitalise townscapes by conserving old buildings that are integral to the streetscape of authentic Irish urban centres.
The record in Ireland for preserving our old towns and villages has in the main been very poor, with many hundreds of fine vernacular buildings and shopfronts being demolished or mutilated by inappropriate ‘improvements’. You do not have to travel far to see closed-up or neglected premises, ugly PVC windows and careless signage. What is extraordinary is that people who marvel at intact historic towns abroad cannot see that the neglect or even demolition of property in Ireland diminishes heritage for locals and visitors.
There are, of course, exceptions, such as Westport or Listowel, which could be held up as exemplary. Since its inception in 2013, the HTI has encouraged towns such as Youghal, Enniscorthy, Kells, Carrick-on-Suir, Boyle and Nenagh by showing what can be done simply by roofing, rendering, painting and repairing such features as windows and shopfronts.
A recent example of the success of the HTI is in the 18th-century town of Ramelton in Donegal, where traditional houses with an old cart entrance and an attractive group of corner buildings were renovated. The initiative was one of three projects from Ireland and Britain to be shortlisted for the Sustainable Heritage Award at the UK’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Heritage Awards.
For the last few years, a fund of about €1.4 million per annum has been spread around HTI projects all over the country. As expected, all such work is supervised and carried out to high conservation standards.
Peter Pearson
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