It is no surprise that the Living City Initiative has turned out to be an abject failure of public policy, as even its originator – Minister for Finance Michael Noonan – has conceded in response to a parliamentary question from Fine Gael TD John Deasy.
The fact that only 33 applications have been received from property owners in qualifying areas of Dublin, Cork, Galway, Kilkenny and Waterford, with not one in his home city of Limerick, is risible. But the scheme, which took several years to emerge, was almost designed to fail due to the eligibility restrictions with which it was festooned – ostensibly, to overcome EU rules on State aid to the private sector.
Although conceived as a tax incentive to encourage the rescue of decaying Georgian houses, it was later expanded to include all historic buildings with 1915 as the cut-off date.
Yet Dublin’s Eden Quay was included in the Living City Initiative maps, although most of it was rebuilt in the 1920s, following the devastation caused by the 1916 Rising and subsequent Civil War.
Even if buildings were the right age, the scheme limited the total floor area in any case to “not more than 210 square metres” – ignoring the fact that Georgian houses are often much larger and, therefore, would not qualify for the tax incentives on offer.
With owners entitled to write off 100 per cent of the cost of refurbishing a pre-1915 building over a 10-year period, one might have expected that the local authorities would be flooded with applications.
But even the amount that renovators could claim – capped at €200,000 – was unrealistically low, given the scale of the refurbishment challenge in many cases. This restriction and all of the others imposed by a parsimonious Department of Finance will now be reviewed, according Mr Noonan. Certainly, a viable solution must be found to make the Living City Initiative work, with so many historic buildings urgently in need of restoration.
Indeed, it could be said that much of Ireland’s architectural heritage depends on finding a mechanism that will breathe new life into historic buildings, thereby securing their future.