Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending. Ballingarry is the area where I live and between two of the villages close to where I live, there is a place called Knockfierna. Its name means “hill of truth”, so if the Chairman wonders why I always tell the truth, it is because I live on the hill of truth. I love heritage and I love everything to do with our heritage. I have been in construction all my life. In 2018, we rebuilt the old oifig an phoist in Kilmallock, which is now the new credit union. It was a fantastic project. It went on longer than was anticipated but the building needed the care to bring it back into production. Only for the credit union getting that building at the time, it could not have stayed open during Covid. It gave the credit union accessibility to a wide area due to the mailing room and it allowed the staff to be there. It was brilliant to see that.

In Limerick, we have conservation officers like Tom Cassidy and Sarah McCutcheon but the resources are not there for them. I meet with Mr. Cassidy on a regular basis on different projects. If we have to rebuild our old stock, they must have the supports they need. If somebody falls ill in their job, there is no one there to take on the project, so it sits still and does not go forward.

I love old buildings and I want to protect them but I have a common sense side to me as well. I look at some places that are falling down. The cost of rebuilding certain places is not worth it, in particular domestic homes. I am talking about streetscapes in towns and villages. What I would like to see happening for buildings that have gone so far, and where we want to bring a new generation into the towns and also get eco-friendly houses which are better for the environment, is for us to keep the front façades of buildings and the old roof structures. If they need to be made more modern behind that, let it happen. In the same way that there can be the uneconomical repair of a car, there can be the uneconomical repair of a building. To do that would still keep the front façade on the street. If the rest of the house is not worth protecting, we could just keep the front. At the same time, I believe our iconic buildings need to be protected.

I have seen places where people went for insurance on their domestic house and they could not insurance on the front room, inside the front door, because it had a timber lath ceiling. The advice was that they had to remove the timber lath ceiling, fireproof it and put it back in place. The insurance company would not insure the front part of the building but as the next room was a new extension on the rear of the house, it would insure that. We have to try to get rid of that. That is what I mean by uneconomical repairs.

I am involved in vintage clubs to celebrate the heritage we have through vintage machinery, going back from modern machinery to the horse. I do a lot of charity runs to raise money for different charities. I have visited many graveyards, especially in November, and I see that many are in need of funding in order to protect them. Again, even if the funding was there, we need the proper groups that will take it on and have respect within the graveyards. I have a list of graveyards where, for ten or 12 years, people cannot go in to visit their loved ones because they are in dread of a protected structure within the graveyard that has been fenced off by a metal fence and there is no funding to repair it. That is very hard. That is as hard as the situation during Covid where people cannot visit their families. They might want to sit down beside the grave and have a chat, and there is nothing wrong with that. However, this is preventing people from getting to the graveyards. That is wrong.

I am 100% for biodiversity. I am 100% for replacing our old stock and also for modernising the old stock, with the old meeting the new. That is great and it brings people into this. To get the youth involved in heritage, we have to bring it to their level. The way to bring it to the level of young people and to make it interesting for them is to show them. I am talking about re-enactments at different places in order to make history fun and young people learn about their heritage. If we showed a child today a phone which is not that old but has the dial on it, they would look at it and ask, “What is this?”, and they would wonder why they cannot press it. Let us bring them back to things like the phone where people twisted a handle to ring the exchange. We need to bring them in and give this to them through fun. We can drop a seed and, in a year or two, they may come back and look for more fun. In that way, we teach them about our heritage because they consider it so backwards that it is enjoyable for them to watch, but they also learn. To me, that is a way forward. When the greenway was opened in Limerick recently, we saw the replacement of the houses along the greenway. It was an outstanding example of what can be done if we have the right people doing the right work.

I go around a lot of buildings and people ask me how I can help. The first thing I see is the dread on their faces when they hear the word “listed” and they think they will have to sell the whole place to get the work done. I was in a premises recently where the roof has been off since the 1950s due to the rates. It is a fabulous, iconic building. I have been looking outside of this country to get investors in to try to bring back buildings like this in certain areas. They are afraid because every time they went about doing it, there was a litany of problems in front of them that they had to deal with, and the investors ran for the hills. We have come to a new approach that I am currently looking at for people with iconic buildings so that, for investigation purposes, somebody can go in and clean around the building, make a full investigation into what needs to be done to the building and mark all the stones as they are. We can then take that into account and get proper costings for the repair of the building to make it as close as can be to the original by doing minor works to it, so we can then go to investors. That can be done under section 57. We welcome people coming in to do it but, again, people who have respect for the building, who can be on a list and who can go in and respectfully take on these buildings. As a country, if the Government or the Heritage Council cannot support this, we can bring in investors from outside the country who will want to do this and who might want to reopen and let the public back in to see such buildings.

What I want from today is the name of a contact person to go to in order to help me and guide me, and to cut through the red tape so I can help replace many of the iconic buildings, structures, fences and walls, and so we can all work together. I want us to move forward without having a wall put in front of us. If the Heritage Council comes up with something, I want to be able to see if that can be simplified so we can all move forward and get more buildings protected. That is what I want from today. I want a direct contact from the Heritage Council.

I would like the witnesses to come and see one or two of the buildings I have in mind. I can guarantee that we will get investors in there. We have Adare and Croom. There are many fantastic buildings in Kilmallock, Askeaton, where some date from the 14th century, and other places, but only one or two of them are open to the public. We need all of them to be opened up. There are buildings that are mind-blowing for the next generation. I ask the witnesses to open up a line communication with me such that we can all work together and move forward.