Scheme to protect Dublin’s historic buildings ‘largely meaningless’

Dublin’s endangered Georgian houses have effectively been excluded from a new tax relief scheme designed to regenerate the historic core of city centres, because they are too big.

The Living City initiative allows owners of houses that are at least 100 years old to claim tax relief for their refurbishment, at a rate of 10 per cent per year for 10 years, against their income.

Minister for Finance Michael Noonan announced the introduction of the scheme in his 2013 budget speech, but it was only brought into effect in recent days.

However, Dublin Civic Trust said the scheme had been "rendered largely meaningless" by a cap of 210sq m on the floor area of eligible houses.

"This excludes the majority of Georgian housing in Dublin, and the very properties that need the incentive most, especially on the northside," Trust spokesman Graham Hickey said.

A typical Georgian house in Dublin is 400sq m and can range up to 500sq m. “Even modest Georgians built in the 1830s and 1840s on streets like Belvedere Place, Nelson Street, Sherrard Street – the very houses that desperately need designation – are in the order of 230-300sq m,” Mr Hickey said.

Pivotal streets

The cap would also exclude “vast tracts of pivotal streets” in Limerick and other cities, he said.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Finance said the cap was set so as “not to create a tax relief for mansion-type properties”.

Dublin’s historic buildings, particularly on the northside of the city, have suffered a marked decline since the abolition in 2011 of the National Conservation Grant. The grant funded up to 50 per cent of the cost of repairs and conservation measures for buildings on the Record of Protected Structures.

Dublin City Council recently had to undertake emergency work to stabilise a Georgian house on North Frederick Street after large sections of its back wall fell away. This protected structure, which was on the council's derelict sites register and considered an "at risk" historic building, would be too large to qualify for the tax incentive scheme.

Georgian houses would only be eligible for inclusion in the scheme if they were subdivided and sold off as apartments, Mr Hickey said. The individual apartment owners could then apply for the tax benefit.

“This not only sustains the status quo of a saturation of multiple-occupancy in the north Georgian core, it is also the State effectively saying that the only way we will incentivise the restoration of large historic properties is to chop them up.”

The scheme also excludes mews buildings such as converted coach houses, or historic former churches and schools, because the building must have been built as a residential property to qualify.

Commercial buildings

However owners of commercial buildings can benefit from the scheme if their property is within the designated “special regeneration area” of Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford and Kilkenny, even if it is not more than 100 years old.

“Effectively, any dodgy modern unit, shed or otherwise, can be incentivised for a capital upgrade for retail or service use, anywhere in Dublin city, or the other cities, within the designated areas,” Mr Hickey said.