Ennis - O'Connell Monument - 20180915202936

The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH) maintains a central database of the architectural heritage of the

Republic of Ireland Ireland ( ga, Éire ), also known as the Republic of Ireland (), is a country in north-western Europe consisting of 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, on the eastern side of the island. A ...

covering the period since 1700 in complement to the

Archaeological Survey of Ireland The Archaeological Survey of Ireland is a unit of the National Monuments Service, which is currently managed by the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. The unit maintains a database of all known archaeological monuments and sites ...

, which focuses on archaeological sites of the pre-1700 period. As of 2022, there are over 50,000 records in the database, including buildings, monuments, street furniture and other structures. It does not cover

Northern Ireland Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is variously described as a country, province or region. Nort ...

. Buildings recorded in the database are given a rating, either national or regional.

Formation

The NIAH is a unit of the Heritage Division within the

Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage ( ga, An Roinn Tithíochta, Rialtais Áitiúil agus Oidhreachta) is a department of the Government of Ireland. It is led by the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage who is ...

. The unit was founded in 1990 to address the obligations of the Convention for the Protection of the Architectural Heritage of Europe of which Ireland is signatory. Initially, the NIAH existed only on a non-statutory basis with the task to create and maintain an inventory of to be protected buildings and sites. The legal framework for the NIAH was established with the Architectural Heritage (National Inventory) and Historic Monuments (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act of 1999 which introduced access rights to the interior of buildings for the NIAH and preservation obligations for the local planning authorities. The subsequent Planning and Development Act 2000 delegated the responsibility to maintain records of protected structures (RPS) to the planning authorities, leaving the role to identify and document significant objects of architectural heritage to NIAH.

Operation

Surveying started in 1991 and focused first on towns. Clare was the first county to perform a county survey. Each building covered by one of the surveys is rated on a scale that includes the values "record only", "local", "regional", "national", and "international" where usually objects of at least regional significance are considered for protection. In 2001, then minister

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used the result of these surveys to recommend the inclusion of 2,155 buildings in the record of protected structures by the respective planning authorities. As a full survey of the entire country using the same approach as for the town surveys was assumed to take more than 100 years, it was decided to begin with interim county surveys that focused on buildings with at least of regional significance. The surveys were published on

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s and online. The dataset has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. In addition, a series of books was published, each presenting the highlights of one of the surveys. As of 2017, 33 volumes were published. Another surveying project of the NIAH focuses on historic gardens and designed landscapes. These surveys started by comparing the 19th-century maps of the

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against aerial photography and were followed by on-site evaluations. In June 2009, the NIAH won the Europa Nostra Award for this project.

References

Notes

Sources

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External links