John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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617. To ask the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht arising from visits to the site by various Ministers, the financial support she will provide to the owners of Jerpoint Park, the lost town of Saint Nicholas in County Kilkenny, to protect the site; the funding schemes available to the owners of such important heritage sites; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [9923/16]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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With regard to funding, the position is that financial support is provided by my Department through a number of structured schemes for the conservation and protection of heritage buildings. My Department itself operates a Structures at Risk Fund to enable conservation works to heritage structures, in both private and public ownership, that are protected under the Planning and Development Acts and are deemed to be at significant risk of deterioration. This fund, which has an allocation of €624,000 in 2016, is administered through the local authorities and seeks to encourage the regeneration and reuse of heritage properties and to help to secure the preservation of protected structures which might otherwise be lost. Applications for this scheme have now closed for 2016, and recommended projects are currently being finalised.

I launched a new €2 million scheme - the Built Heritage Investment Scheme - for the repair and conservation of protected structures on 21 October 2015. This scheme will operate in 2016, via the local authorities, on the same model as the very successful Built Heritage Jobs Leverage Scheme, which ran in 2014. It is expected to support a significant number of projects across the country and to create employment in the conservation and construction industries, while helping to regenerate urban and rural areas. The scheme for this year is now fully allocated.

The Heritage Council, which my Department funds, also provides grants for the protection and preservation of the built heritage. For 2016, the Council is administering a community based heritage grants scheme available for projects that contributed to particular heritage themes. The Council would be able to advise if the particular structure referred to by the Deputy would be eligible for funding, now or in the future.

The remainder of my Department’s built heritage capital budget for 2016 will be focused on the conservation and presentation of the State's heritage portfolio, which is managed by the Office of Public Works.