COUNCIL WELCOMES INCLUSION OF VALENTIA PROJECT ON WORLD HERITAGE TENTATIVE LIST

Kerry County Council warmly welcomes the announcement by the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Darragh O’Brien that the Valentia Trans-Atlantic Cable Ensemble is to be included on the new Irish Tentative List of World Heritage Properties to be progressed for World Heritage inscription.

This has been a long-term objective of Kerry County Council since it was initiated by the Valentia Island Development Company in 2012 and has since been strongly supported by the Council, Government Departments and other public and private partners in Ireland and abroad.

Welcoming the announcement, the Cathaoirleach of Kerry County Council, Cllr John Francis Flynn, paid tribute to all involved in the project in bringing it to this stage. ‘I want to thank Kerry County Council for lending this important project its full support from the outset. I also want to salute Micheál Lyne and the members of the Valentia Island Development Company for their ambition and persistence in pursuing this for over a decade.

‘A key private partner has been the Valentia Trans-Atlantic Cable Foundation, led by Leonard Hobbs, who has played a key role in fundraising and promotion of the project and Dr. Donard Cogan, Chairman of the Valentia-Hearts Content Technical Group, all who have given their time on the voluntary basis. I want to remember the late Anthony O’Connell of VIDCO who had spearheaded the project until his death in March 2019.

‘This project has enjoyed cross-party support within Kerry County Council.’

Chief Executive of Kerry County Council, Moira Murrell, acknowledged the Pollmieir family who facilitated the project by gifting the Cable Station to the community in 2018. Ms. Murrell thanked the National Monuments Service, the Department of Rural & Community Development for their financial support for the conservation and adaptation of the Cable Station, Fáilte Ireland for funding the new visitor exhibition in the Cable Station, and the Munster Technological University for its support from the outset.

‘Kerry County Council is committed to working with the community and other partners to ensure the social and economic benefits of the designation to Valentia and wider area are maximised. This is primarily why Kerry County Council embraced this project. We are using it as a lever to regenerate the area and ensure a sustainable future for the people living there,’ she said.

The Valentia Trans-Atlantic Cable Ensemble is one of three projects to make it onto the new Irish Tentative List which was last announced in 2010. The focus now is to complete the works on the Cable Station and progress the application to the next stage which will involve further consultation with the local community, completion of the socio-economic plan, preparation of the joint management plan with Newfoundland/Canada and on the World Heritage nomination dossier, with the Department’s World Heritage Unit, for consideration by UNESCO in Paris. This may take at least five years to complete.

Placing the Valentia Trans-Atlantic Cable Ensemble on the Irish Tentative List for Word Heritage, following independent evaluation, signals that the project has outstanding universal value – the key UNESCO requirement - and merits consideration by UNESCO for World Heritage inscription. Unlike Ireland’s other two World Heritage sites at Skellig Michael and Brú na Boinne, this is an industrial heritage site where people live and work and will continue to do so.

It will also be Ireland’s first trans-national World Heritage application and the Kerry team has been working for several years with its Canadian partners in Hearts Content and Newfoundland, at the western end of the cable, to progress the joint application. Hearts Content is already on the Canadian Tentative List. It is acknowledged that it will take several more years for the joint project to be assessed by UNESCO but this is an enormous step forward for the project and a lot of the groundwork has already been done.

The linking of Europe and North America by undersea electric telegraph cable from Valentia to Newfoundland, first in 1858 and permanently from 1866, revolutionised global communications. It was the precursor of the linked world we have today. Messages that would take 9 days (one way) to cross the Atlantic Ocean by steam ship in 1870 now took minutes to transmit by telegraph. The achievement by Cyrus Field and his colleagues, after several attempts, was one of the great engineering and scientific achievements of the 19th century and Valentia was at its heart. Valentia Cable Station was the hub of Trans-Atlantic telecommunications for the next 100 years, employing up to 200 people directly and supporting an entire island community.

The closure of the Cable Station in 1966 led to a spiral of decline on the island which has been halted and reversed in recent years through community collaboration and public and private investment. The Council has been at the forefront of this regeneration, working closely with the community, and was successful in securing funding under the Rural Regeneration and Development Fund to conserve and adapt the Cable Building as a museum and innovation hub respecting its heritage and tradition as a centre of innovatio