An important project to help preserve Northern Ireland’s best old structures

An initiative to revive dwindling crafts needed to maintain historic buildings is being expanded.

The scheme, which we report on page 14, began in Northern Ireland, to teach half a dozen students skills such as stone masonry and thatching and metal forging.

Supported by the Prince’s Foundation and Stormont’s Historic Environment Division (HED), which repairs sites such as the Londonderry walls, it is now being expanded to link up with Heritage Council in the Republic of Ireland.

This is a small project but an important one.

Philip O’Neill, of HED, said the pilot had brought in a new generation of craftspeople at a time of concern over a widening skills shortage in the heritage sector.

The world is in most respects becoming a better and more advanced place, with people living longer and more prosperous lives. But there are not only environmental challenges for human civilisation, there are also respects in which man-made culture has regressed.

One of the clearest examples of this is the decline in good architecture. Consider Belfast, for example. In the late 1700s and all through the 1800s and into early 1900s, scores of stunning buildings were constructed, of such high quality that they remain structures of quality and beauty centuries later.

Now, while we are a much more wealthy and much more technologically sophisticated society, barely any similarly striking buildings are completed in Northern Ireland’s capital city, aside from the occasional exception such as the Bar Library.

And it is not just grand buildings that are in decline but simpler ones, like churches, which are almost never built to the same standard as the fine older ones that dot the length and breadth of the Ulster countryside.

In that case, the least we can do is make every effort to maintain our best existing buildings, some of which like Carrickfergus Castle go back almost a millennium.

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