Over €280K Announced For Kildare Monuments And Historic Sites

Tuesday, 19 April 2022 15:24

By Caoimhe Harney

The funding is under the Community Monuments Fund.

The Community Monuments Fund grants of €281,426 has been announced for Kildare's local monuments and historic sites.

The Minister of State for Heritage and Electoral Reform, Mr Malcolm Noonan, TD, today announced the award of grants for a wide range of archaeological heritage projects under the Department’s 2022 Community Monuments Fund.

Under the scheme last year under 139 awards were granted to an amount of just under €4.2 million, this year 128 projects are being supported with an overall investment of €6 million.

The Kildare projects awarded funding under the Community Monuments Fund;

Site/Monument/Project	Award
Kildare Cathedral Round Tower	€85,000.00
Coillte Donadea Castle, Donadea Forest Park	€85,000.00
Moone Tower, Dovecote	€27,856.65
St Michael's Church, Athy	€83,570.00

The core objective of the Community Monuments Fund is to support the conservation, maintenance, protection and promotion of local monuments and historic sites.

It contains a number of different measures aimed at enabling conservation works to be carried out on archaeological monuments which are deemed to be significant and in need of urgent support, encouraging access to archaeological monuments and improving their presentation and also building resilience in archaeological monuments to enable them to withstand the effects of climate change.

Under three Streams, the Community Monuments Fund supports a broad range of measures aimed at protecting and promoting archaeological monuments, including emergency conservation repair works at monuments, masonry repair, the development of Conservation Management Plans, access infrastructure and installation of interpretation signage, and social media projects aimed at disseminating knowledge of Ireland’s archaeological heritage.