An ambitious conservation plan for Portlaw, Co Waterford - Ireland's most significant model industrial town - was unveiled by the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen, yesterday.
The plan was commissioned by the Heritage Council, the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Waterford County Council and the local community.
It notes that Portlaw, 13 miles northwest of Waterford city, owes its existence to the great 19th century industrialist and Quaker, David Malcolmson, who established a cotton mill there in 1825.
Malcolmson and his sons turned Portlaw into a hive of industry centred on the vast six-storey mill with its inter-connected system of canals, weirs, gasworks, bleach fields, weaving sheds and foundries.
In what the authors describe as "one of the more exciting episodes in the history of industrial development in Ireland", they created a model village outside the mill gates, inspired by Robert Owen's New Lanark, near Glasgow.
Most unusually, the workers' housing was laid out on a Baroque plan. The gently curving timber-framed "Portlaw roof" of these houses is still the town's most striking architectural feature, even though more than half are gone. Many of the original houses were demolished from 1940 onwards to make way for new county council housing, while many of those that survive have been altered by "improvements" such as PVC windows.
The conservation plan recommends that all of the surviving model village houses should be designated protected structures.
The plan advocates the same protection for the derelict mill and other significant buildings in the town.
But before anything can be done with the mill, a major decontamination programme would have to be undertaken to remove chemicals and other waste dumped by Irish Tanners since it became a tannery in the 1930s.
The tannery closed down in the mid-1980s, more than a century after the Malcolmson empire collapsed, leaving the vast mill building derelict once again and sinking Portlaw into its second period of economic decline.
Other buildings associated with the mill, such as Mayfield House and its gate lodge, are also derelict and in varying states of decay.
