'Secret' apartment built in Kilkenny Castle never used because of health and safety

Details are emerging on the construction of a ‘secret’ apartment on top of Kilkenny Castle.
“Hundreds of thousands of euro were spent on the structure that no one knows anything about,” Deputy John McGuinness has claimed.
“It is hard to fathom that after it was completed it was deemed unsuitable for use on health and safety grounds,” he added. He was told in a written answer to a Dáil question that it was never used as a residence due to its location on the top floor of the West Tower, accessed via a medieval, spiral staircase with the only emergency evacuation route being over the roof battlements.
Deputy McGuinness again raised the matter in the Dail and feels he was, once more, ‘fobbed off’. He was told the apartment was provided as part of major restoration works carried out at the castle between 1997 and 2001 which cost €5 million. “The apartment constituted a very minor part of these works and it is extremely difficult at this remove to extract and identify precisely how much the apartment element cost,” he was told by Kevin Boxer Moran, Minister for State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.
Deputy McGuinness said it his information that every part of an OPW project is costed and that there must be figures for the apartment and he has called on Minister Moran to release them.