Prince Charles revealed to celebrity gardener Diarmuid Gavin recently that he’d like to apply the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community to the problem of Ireland’s ghost estates, the Irish Sun reported.
Gavin, of Dublin, told the Irish Sun that “Prince Charles wants to have a go at ghost estates in Ireland.”
“He is fascinated by that,” Gavin said.
The Prince’s Foundation, which has helped redevelop struggling towns in the UK such as Camp Hill, is currently expanding its focus beyond architecture to include gardening.
“He talked to me and my wife Justine about it at dinner at St James’s Palace,” Gavin, a television gardener, said.
“We have big plans, very big plans, in the next year,” Gavin said.
But for the Prince, an intention to help isn’t enough. Charles “needs to be invited,” Gavin said.
An official visit to Ireland hasn’t yet been planned for Prince Charles, a Buckingham Palace insider told the Sun.
“There’s not anything in the diary at the moment, and if he was going to do a visit it would be announced in the normal way,” the source told the Sun. “But if he has said he wants to go over, I’m sure the intention is there.”
There are around 2,800 unfinished and unoccupied housing developments in Ireland left over from the Celtic Tiger’s ghastly fall, IrishCentral previously reported.
The Prince’s Foundation for Building Community aims to create sustainable communities and preserve building techniques, through education, planning, and infrastructure improvement, according to the foundation website.
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