Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Historically, over many decades, the Office of Public Works, OPW, has held a statutory remit for the care and conservation of Ireland’s heritage estate. In tandem with this statutory role, the OPW has a mandate to engage in the presentation to the public of heritage sites entrusted to its care. The increasing popularity of heritage sites with visitors, to a point where it is estimated that visits to Irish heritage sites number in excess of 20 million annually, is highly encouraging and represents a strong endorsement of the success of this approach.

The OPW has a strategic partnership with Fáilte Ireland and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to spur investment in the heritage estate to increase standards of interpretation and visitor experience and support local tourism economies. Cashel has featured as a site of focus since the earliest days of this partnership.

The Rock of Cashel is one of six sites making up the Royal Sites of Ireland, which were placed on the UNESCO tentative list for world heritage in July 2022. The OPW is entrusted with the care of the complex of five national monuments situated on the Rock of Cashel. In 1975, the hall of the vicar's choral was re-roofed and restored, part financed by the European Regional Development Fund. In the early 2000s, a major conservation project started on Cormac’s Chapel, which is not only one of the most significant early Romanesque buildings in the country but also contains fragments of an immensely important scheme of wall paintings. There is a continuous conservational ethos with all the buildings on-site.

I am encouraged to note there has been a strong recovery in visitor numbers to the Rock of Cashel post pandemic. In 2019, there were 272,498 visitors. Between January and August 2022, there were 210,154 visitors to the site, which places it in a strong position to equal if not surpass pre-pandemic visitor numbers.

As the Deputy is aware, the OPW is one entity working as part of a collaborative effort in place since mid-2019, together with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Fáilte Ireland and Tipperary County Council, to assess options for the development of a new all-purpose visitor facility in the town which would serve the needs of the Rock of Cashel visitor site and the town of Cashel, acting as an engine for economic, tourism and cultural sector growth. The remit of the OPW in this wider collaborative effort relates primarily to our dual mandate to conserve and present for visitors the complex of national monuments that make up the Rock of Cashel site and have been entrusted to the care of the OPW.

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