‘Small scale’ movement on dereliction in Cork, say campaigners

This week, anti-dereliction campaigners Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry are celebrating five years since they began highlighting the issue blighting Cork city and town centres around the county and country, and they are marking the anniversary with a series of pop-up events in the city centre today.

Speaking to The Echo, the couple said that, since they began their public campaign, there have been discernible changes in culture and “concrete progress”, as 30% properties that were vacant at the beginning of the five years are now occupied having been upgraded or refurbished.

According to Mr O’Connor, the phrase “dereliction is a social crime” is a phrase they introduced when they began their public campaign, a launch which was preceded by 18 months of research.

Now, they hear it being used by politicians regularly — particularly from members of the Social Democrats, Labour, the Greens, Sinn Féin, but even also among government parties representatives.

Policies

They also point to the introduction of policies to counter dereliction in the party manifestos before the general election in November, policies which didn’t feature before the 2020 election.

“There is movement happening, but it is small and it’s often the small scale,“ said Mr O’Connor.

“Like you know the one-off houses that are getting sold and then getting done up.

“And the council overall has definitely massively increased, like doubled, the register of derelict properties but the scale of it is still so big,” he added.

Levies

Recent stories in The Echo have highlighted issues such as the debts owed to both the city and county councils — a total of over €8m — because of uncollected derelict and vacant site levies.

They point to the fundamental weakness of the derelict sites register, which only contains a handful of sites compared to the hundreds that are across the city and county that are obviously vacant and falling into disrepair.

During their tour of Cork city in 2021, the couple found that there were more than 700 derelict properties in the city centre or within a 1km radius.