Banner image: The Royal Hospital Kilmainham Park is operated by the OPW. Viewed here are the upper formal gardens during the spring equinox sunset. The park was awarded both Green Flag Award and Green Heritage Site Accreditation status in 2025. Photo: Robert Moss, 2021.

By Robert Moss, Green Flag for Park Awards Development Manager, February 2026

In Ireland, Green Heritage Accreditation was introduced in 2021, as a new component of the international Green Flag Award for Parks scheme. It had previously been identified by An Taisce as a useful support in protecting the heritage and history of our public green spaces. To date, this heritage award only operates in Ireland, Portugal, United Arab Emirates, and the UK.

For the 2025 Green Flag Award Ceremony, hosted by Maynooth Campus – which is one of 17 Green Heritage Accreditation winning sites in Ireland, the Minister of State for Nature, Heritage and Biodiversity, Christopher O’Sullivan, stated:

“It reflects the appreciation and understanding of our heritage that there is an increase in Green Heritage sites this year. This scheme is a welcome and important complement to the Green Flag Award, and I am delighted my Department, through its National Parks and Wildlife Service, supports and co-funds the Green Heritage Site Accreditation Programme.

The Green Heritage Accreditation celebrates best practice in engagement with our heritage and reminds us all of our responsibility to appreciate and preserve richness and diversity of the green spaces that surround us.” 

There is a deep connection between our cultural heritage and the many parks and gardens that serve as a bridge between the rural and urban World. It is under appreciated as to how much of our history and culture is the result of the slow evolution of farming and toil over many centuries often through adversity. This shared heritage from many lives lived is slowly being lost from our collective memory as we move further away from it, and into a consumer service based society of more convenience. The loss of hardship and the precarious existence of living solely on what could be won from the land is clearly not something to mourn. However, with the passing from living memory of how to eke out a living from small holdings and marginal land we also lose much of the folklore, songs, vocabulary, tools, horticultural practices, and even the very varieties of fruit and vegetables that were bred and carefully cultivated over countless generations.

Image above: Tidy Towns historic monument, Castlemahon, west Limerick. Photo: Robert Moss, 2012.

The historic parks and gardens of Ireland can and do serve as a repository for this generational knowledge of our past rural culture. The lives loves and fears of so many of our ancestors were not marked in historical events, but rather lived anonymously within the seasons and their rural traditions. As these traditions become fragmented and lost to general knowledge then we also lose much of our agricultural heritage and identity. Many parks and historic gardens were created and their form shaped by these traditions. They now provide a talisman to time itself … icons of past endeavour now discarded. Something that if investigated can offer a touchstone to the past. Not a doorway offering time travel, but certainly a window revealing past intent.

The span of time encompassed across these sites, and the wider rural landscape, is intimidating in its scale. From the oldest know field systems in the World at Céide Fields at 5500 years old, to Ireland’s oldest Park which is the Phoenix Park in Dublin at a mere 350 years old. This was established in 1662 as a Royal Deer Park by James Butler, Duke of Ormond, on behalf of King Charles II. The former of these two sites, Céide Fields, was established when Ireland was forested, and the Sahara Desert was still a green savannah. This was before a colder climate buried Céide Fields in blanket bog, and the Saharan Savannah in sand and desert hamada.

The heritage value of public green spaces is not limited to how old they are though. The UCD Campus in Belfield has been home to the Lamb-Clarke Irish Historical Apple collection since as recently as 1997. The history of this collection merits an article all of its own, but briefly in the late 1940’s the horticulturalist Keith Lamb travelled all over Ireland searching for as many native Irish apple cultivars as he could find which had not already become extinct. This allowed him to create a collection of these rare varieties of Irish Apples at Albert College in Glasnevin. Unfortunately this collection of hundreds of years of Irish apple cultivation with unique tastes and culinary usage was accidently destroyed in 1970. Luckily clones of these cultivars had previously been sent to England in the 1950s, and so in 1997 the lost Irish Historic Apple Collection was able to return to Ireland thanks to the work of Professor Michael Hennerty and his team.

The Lamb-Clarke Irish Historical Apple collection at the UCD Rosemount Environmental Research Station, Belfield Campus, Dublin. Photo: Robert Moss, 2014.

Many of these historic parks and gardens are also an important component of our collective health and wellbeing. As well as providing space to exercise and play, they also reconnect us with nature. Their management and promotion is therefore important beyond their value ascultural and historic assets as they provide important green space amenities for rural and urban communities.

The introduction of the Green Heritage Site Accreditation by An Taisce in 2021 was made possible by the support of The National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Department of Housing, Local Government, and Heritage. In 2025, 17 of the 128 Irish Green Flag Award sites were also awarded Green Heritage Site Accreditation status.

The list of 2025 Green Heritage Site Accreditations in Ireland is as follows:

• Cavan Burren Park: Cavan County Council
• The Palace Grounds : Galway County Council
• Tralee Bay Wetlands: Kerry County Council
• Lough Gur Lakeshore Park and Visitor Centre: Limerick City and County Council
• Turlough Park: Mayo County Council
• Jackie Clarke Collection Heritage Garden: Mayo County Council
• Killarney House and Gardens: National Parks and Wildlife Service​​
• Connemara National Park:​ National Parks and Wildlife Service
• Ballycroy Visitor Centre - Wild Nephin National Park: National Parks and Wildlife Service
• University of Galway: National University of Ireland Galway
• Maynooth Campus: National University of Ireland Maynooth
• Garinish Island: Office of Public Works
• Irish National War Memorial Gardens: Office of Public Works
• Derrynane Historic Park: Office of Public Works
• Altamont House and Gardens: Office of Public Works
• Battle of the Boyne Visitor Centre: Office of Public Works
• Royal Hospital Kilmainham: Office of Public Works

Within the Republic of Ireland, the Green Flag Award for Parks Scheme is operated by An Taisce — the National Trust for Ireland. The scheme was established here in 2015 and has now grown to 128 accredited sites as of 2025. The Green Flag Award accredits green space amenities that maintain standards sustainably.

A component of the scheme is the Green Heritage Site Accreditation, which is awarded to public green spaces that are managed to Green Flag Award standards. It supports those sites that actively understand, identify, manage and promote the elements of their heritage that make that site unique.