Cork City Council making progress in tackling dereliction issue 

The chief executive of Cork City Council has said that a “key mechanism” for encouraging inner-city living is tackling dereliction and relaxing regulations surrounding residency above shops.

Speaking at a Cork Business Association (CBA) event, held in the Clayton Hotel yesterday morning, Valerie O’Sullivan said that while dereliction is a nationwide issue, progress is being made in terms of reintegrating properties for residential use in Cork.

“We are accelerating our engagement around dereliction, which is an issue for every city and town in Ireland,” said Ms O’Sullivan.

“This is a very complex issue, complete with legal ownership [and] constitutional hurdles, but we’re jumping them, because we are making progress. We do need to make things happen quicker for Cork.

“To that end, we are talking to the NTMA [National Treasury Management Agency], ISIF [Ireland Strategic Investment Fund], the OPR [Office of the Planning Regulator], Cork County Council, the Port of Cork, the NTA [National Transport Authority], Government departments, and with the Taoiseach himself to see if we can reduce or remove impediments or blockages, by working more effectively together.

Counterbalance

“The Cork region has the key counterbalance to Dublin, with the highest targets in employment and population growth; [and] if funding followed policy, there would be no implementation gap,” she added.

“If we are the second city, if policy states we are second, then implementing policy logically means giving us the second-biggest share of national funding and removing the barriers to pace.

“What we must do is ensure that the old is brought to the same standard as the new, and that the present meets the future as an equal, and not as a poor relation.”

Ms O’Sullivan further said that “in this country, we have regulated ourselves out of making [living over shops] viable”.

“It’s exactly what’s wrong, and is, in my view, a key mechanism through which to bring people back into residential use in city-centre spaces,” she said.

“What we’re going to try and do is bring a couple of those spaces back into use.”

Critical concern

Director of services at Cork City Council, Niall Ó Donnabháin, commented: “The city-centre living issue is a critical concern for all of us, and has been for a very long time. There is a significant demand and desire to live in the city centre, and we are providing for construction as we have seen with the Docklands.

“Living over shops is a challenge, [but] the regulations are due to change in March, which will bring a new impetus,” said Mr Ó Donnabháin.

“We’re seeing new schemes come in, in terms of change of use for residential, ... and we are trying to encourage that more and more. We need to see that uptake at a private level [too] — the opportunity is huge.”