City's dereliction rates show little change after 3 years

A new report by dereliction campaigners Frank O'Connor and Jude Sherry has highlighted that more than three-quarters of derelict properties they identified in Cork city three years ago, remain derelict today.

In 2020 Frank O'Connor and Jude Sherry embarked on a project to document the state of derelict buildings in Cork and promote urban regeneration in the city. They posted images on social media of 460 derelict properties located within a 2km radius of Cork city centre every day for an entire year and created a report on the buildings, titled Derelict Ireland.

Now, three years later, the couple have released new research assessing the current status of these properties. Speaking to the Cork Independent, Jude described their new findings “disappointing but not surprising”.

Having revisited all 460 buildings, they discovered that 78% of the buildings and sites remain derelict even after three years. Only 7.6% have been successfully repurposed and are now in use as either homes or businesses. Another 2.9% have been renovated but currently remain vacant, either partially or entirely. Approximately 11.5% of the properties are currently undergoing active construction as refurbishments or new builds.

A further 11% of the buildings have been demolished, an outcome that Jude explains is less than ideal. “The most sustainable building is the existing building, both environmentally, socially and economically,” she said. “Most of the times the buildings that are being demolished are being replaced with like for like. Every building contains embodied carbon in it, that’s carbon was used to create that building. So, you have to replace all that carbon. That can take up to 80 years to have a payback even if you are replacing it with a more energy-efficient building,” she added.

Jude says that people have become blind to the urban decay surrounding them because they are seeing it on a daily basis. “It’s become the cultural norm to have such high rates of dereliction in our towns and city centres,” she said. “But so many people come up to us and tell us once they see it, they can’t unsee it.”

Jude expressed her hope for Cork City Council to take significant action of derelict buildings in the city. “We would like to see the council do a lot more. We shared our original findings with them back in April 2021. We had one meeting with them and they said they had a number of questions for us, but they never came back with those questions,” she said.

Over the past three years, Jude and Frank’s highlighting of derelict buildings has garnered attention and in December 2021, they served as expert witnesses during the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government, and Heritage Debate on Urban Regeneration. Their contributions helped drive policy changes such as the the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant where grants of up to €50,000 are given to renovate a vacant property and up to €70,000 if the property is derelict.

In another positive move, a Vacant Home Tax is also set to be implemented in November 2023. However, Jude says it doesn’t go far enough and recommends increasing the tax rate from the current 0.3% to 5-10% in line with global norms. “0.3% it’s ridiculously low. We’d like to see that increased because vacancy is the gateway to dereliction so it would be great to stop it as early as possible.”