ALMOST £300,000 has been spent in the past five years on maintenance of the former Maze prison buildings.
Parts of the complex – including a H-block and hospital building – are being kept in a "basic state of repair.. until there is ministerial agreement on the way forward for the entire site".
Some £270,000 has been spent since 2014 on items such as windows and roofing for the former prison buildings as part of a "planned preventative maintenance programme".
The details are contained in a briefing paper prepared for Stormont chief David Sterling, obtained by The Irish News.
It includes recent photos from inside the empty prison buildings which have for years been closed off to the public.
The Maze/Long Kesh was the site of the IRA hunger strikes and held some of the north's most notorious paramilitaries before its closure in 2000.
It has been at the centre of an ongoing six-year spat between the DUP and Sinn Féin which has led to the stalling of the site's proposed multi-million-pound redevelopment.
The row erupted in 2013 when then DUP leader and first minister Peter Robinson halted plans for a peace centre after unionist critics argued it would become a shrine to terrorism.
Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness, then deputy first minister, responded by saying no further development would take place until the issue was resolved.
In the years since the fall-out, most requests to use or visit the site have not been approved. Stormont officials have mostly maintained this block since the executive's collapse in 2017.
Last year, Stormont chiefs granted Sinn Féin access to the Maze site.
It came after the party's deputy leader Michelle O'Neill raised concerns about a "deterioration" of the hospital wing where the hunger strikers died in 1981.
In briefing notes from June last year, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, Stormont officials describe how some buildings "which are scheduled, listed or considered to be of historic value have been retained".
They include some prison structures and two Second World War aircraft hangers.
Some £270,000 has been spent since 2014 on maintaining the prison buildings including the hospital building, a H-block, a chapel and prisoner search buildings.
"Further work will be undertaken in line with a planned preventative maintenance programme as the availability of funding permits," the papers read.
They add: "The prison buildings, including the hospital building, are being maintained at a level consistent with protecting the integrity of the buildings pending ministerial agreement on the way forward with the site."
Earlier this week, the Executive Office (TEO) re-appointed the board of the Maze Long Kesh Development Corporation (MLKDC) which is responsible for the site.
Its chairman Terrence Brannigan earns a salary of £30,000 and other board members £6,000 a year for their MLKDC roles, although TEO says they have agreed an "interim reduced remuneration package".
SDLP MLA Dolores Kelly said the board "should be shelved" if it is "simply performing an administrative or bureaucratic function" amid the lack of political agreement on the site's future.
