merrion street

(Tuesday, 14th May)—Jimmy Deenihan T.D., Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, will launch the book Buildings of Ireland vol. 4: South Ulster this evening at 6pm in the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square. This volume, which covers the counties of Cavan, Monaghan and Armagh, is the fourth in the Buildings of Ireland series of architectural guides to Ireland.

Buildings of Ireland is part of the Pevsner Architectural Guides series of guide books to the architecture of Britain and Ireland. Begun in the 1940s by art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the 46 volumes of the original Buildings of England series were published between 1951 and 1974. The series was then extended to Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the late 1970s.

The Buildings of Ireland Charitable Trust was established in 2005 to support the research and writing of future volumes to complete the series for Ireland. Retired Professor Alistair Rowan, the author and joint author of the first and second volumes of the series, is a founder member. The then Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government provided some initial funding to the Trust and substantial funding has since been received from private sources which have enabled the publication of this volume and the ongoing work on further volumes.

Minister Deenihan said: “My own Department, through the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, has been delivering a survey of our built heritage as a vital tool in the protection of that heritage. I see the work of the NIAH and of this series of books as complementary. It was on that basis that my Department allocated limited initial funding to the Trust that funded the research and writing of this book. However, I am pleased to note that the bulk of the funding for the Trust and the series has come from private donors.”

The books are intended to meet the needs of both specialists and the general reader. Each contains an extensive introduction to the architectural history and styles of the area, followed by a town-by-town — and in the case of larger settlements, street-by-street — account of individual buildings. The guides offer both detailed coverage of the most notable buildings and notes on lesser-known and vernacular buildings; all building types are covered but there is a particular emphasis on churches and public buildings. Each volume has a central section with several dozen pages of photographs. The series is published by Yale University Press since 2003.