Decision on fate of old Cork Prison expected ‘by end of year’

A decision on whether the old Cork prison will be demolished will be made before the end of the year, a spokesperson for the Irish Prison Service (IPS) has said.

In May this year, the IPS and Department of Justice posted a formal statutory notice to demolish the old prison, and a public consultation closed at the start of July.

Plans are to develop a new prison with space for 230 men and 100 women on the site, but the current plans deal only with the demolition.

At the end of July, a spokesperson for the Irish Prison Service told The Echo that “the process of reviewing observations to inform a decision to the planning process is currently ongoing and is expected to be completed in the coming weeks”.

This week, the spokesperson said: “The process of reviewing observations to inform a decision to the planning process is still currently ongoing and is expected to be completed by or before the end of 2026.”

The IPS previously said that under Irish planning law, there is no specific statutory deadline by which a State authority must make its final decision on whether a project will proceed under the part nine process which is being utilised for this development.

Part nine of the Planning and Development Regulations 2001 specifically relates to developments undertaken by or on behalf of the Irish Prison Service for specific purposes like national security, public safety, or specialised state infrastructure.

“While standard planning applications submitted by private developers are subject to a strict eight-week statutory decision deadline from the local authority, part nine functions as an exceptional consultation framework,” the spokesperson said.

They added that there are still “tight, rigid statutory timelines” for the process, that the public has a strict six-week window to lodge submissions, but after this “the statutory clock stops”. 

The State “can leave the project in a state of assessment indefinitely, alter the design phase to reflect public feedback, or abandon the redevelopment without breaching any statutory timelines”.