Documenting dereliction in Ireland: ‘Why have we accepted it as a country?’

Jude Sherry, Frank O’Connor and I are staring at the Butter Exchange while the Shandon Bells chime and tourists circle the rotunda of the Firkin Crane Theatre in the sun. In 2018, Sherry and O’Connor came to Cork after years working and living in the Netherlands. They founded Anois, a design consultancy concerned with sustainability, equality and social justice, and bought a 200-year-old worker’s house on the other side of St Anne’s Church. Sherry is from Dublin. O’Connor is from the Cork/Kerry border in Co Cork. “Here they say I’m from Kerry, really,” he says. “We came back and walked up here and thought ‘f**king hell, how amazing it is’.”

“There’s such uniqueness and beauty here,” says Sherry. “So much potential.”

But they also saw other things. “We saw the dereliction, the homeless crisis and the decaying heritage,” says O’Connor.

Our own wellbeing was being affected by walking past dereliction every day

“We were walking past sleeping bags outside derelict homes,” says Sherry. “Massive waste alongside massive need. Those things shouldn’t exist together.”

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“Our own wellbeing was being affected by walking past dereliction every day,” says O’Connor. “It was all about asking questions, really. ‘Why has this become normalised? Why have we accepted it as a country? And what can we do about it?’… We started to map it out.”

They spent two years creating a report called This is Derelict Ireland. They also started posting photographs to Twitter daily, with the hashtag “Derelict Ireland”. Though Cork City Council had 95 properties on its derelict sites register at the time of their report, Sherry and O’Connor found 340 derelict properties within a 2km square mile of the city centre, and researched the planning and sales history of each ( “Jude does all the data work. I just rant and talk,” says O’Connor). They found 700 derelict properties in Cork city in total. Last Autumn they presented a detailed “toolbox” of policy measures to the Oireachtas. In February, the Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage published a report, Urban Regeneration, featuring 39 recommendations, some influenced by their work. “The main challenge here with a lot of the policy stuff is they don’t act on the recommendations,” says O’Connor.

They’re taking me on a tour of the city to look at some of the buildings that inspired their activism. We’re starting with the stately pillars of the Butter Exchange, a beautiful historic building built in 1769. Its last official use was as an arts-and-craft centre, but that ended in 2008. The longer properties are derelict the more difficult it becomes to bring them back into use. “The roof was estimated to cost 60 grand to fix then, and now they estimate it to be about a million ... because it was left like this,” says Sherry.

The plan now is to turn the Exchange into a technology and enterprise hub, a plan which O’Connor is sceptical of. “Twenty per cent of the offices in the city centre are empty. There are empty offices all over the place ... This was the place where the price of butter was set globally back in the day. Cardiff had a coal exchange. We had a butter exchange. A tech hub isn’t really carrying forward that legacy.”

Just behind us on John Redmond Street, two old houses have fallen into disrepair and have been empty for decades. “They’re quite unique. That’s a chimney gable front which is very unusual,” says Sherry.

“Cork has got a really interesting diverse range of architecture,” says O’Connor. “It has a European focus in its architecture and design, where a lot of the rest of the country was influenced by Britain only ... This is also where Shandon brass band [the Butter Exchange Band] used to practice. There’s a plaque on it. That’s where they started. Apparently they don’t have a space any more.”

Given the inaction of the Irish State and local authorities to either enforce existing laws [or] to bring in effective deterrents to end the scourge of dereliction and long-term vacancy, it could be viewed as a civic duty to squat unused buildings

One of O’Connor and Sherry’s interests is spaces for creativity. In the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger, spaces formerly pinpointed for big developments were handed over to artists, but as the market recovered, those artists had to leave. This happened in Cork at the old revenue office on Sullivan Quay and the Camden Palace Hotel. “The sites were just left there,” says Sherry.

Influenced by what they saw in the Netherlands, O’Connor and Sherry have produced a report on “meanwhile use” policies, where communities can use empty properties in their towns. This was produced for the Heritage Council’s collaborative town centre health check programme.

“I think the one thing that’s missing here is the fear of squatting,” says Sherry. “In the Netherlands, ‘meanwhile use’ policies came about because artists were squatting in heritage buildings, bringing them back into use, opening them up to communities. If you go to Amsterdam, any of the cultural spaces, besides the official museums, are all ex-squats ... They brought in different rules to counteract that, to formalise it and to make sure artists still had access to space ... Someone has a right to use a building if the owner isn’t using it ... Things like the Butter Exchange here, in Amsterdam, communities would squat it.”

I later ask, by email, if they’d welcome an Irish squatting movement. They would. Sherry writes: “Given the inaction of the Irish State and local authorities to either enforce existing laws [or] to bring in effective deterrents to end the scourge of dereliction and long-term vacancy, it could be viewed as a civic duty to squat unused buildings. Squatting is a common European practice [for] homes, community centres, creative hubs or to become custodians of our unique decaying heritage buildings.”

We stroll around the corner to Dominick Street, where there’s a disused pub. It’s been empty for a very long time, and has had applications for planning submitted more than once. Sherry spent a lot of time researching the buildings they found and discovered that many have gone through a repetitive cycle of planning applications. “The easiest thing is genuinely to do nothing,” says Sherry. “It increases in value anyway.”

Would the soon-to-be introduced 3 per cent vacancy tax put a stop to people sitting on unused properties for speculative reasons? It’s not high enough, says O’Connor. “We’ve spoken to quite a few builder-developers of different sizes over the last couple years ... They’ll say to us ‘Why would we go working on this if we can make 15 per cent per year on speculation?’ ... So the incentives and disincentives are wrong at the moment.”

Sherry would like to see something progressive that initially takes account of the fact that some people are genuinely experiencing hard times. “We’d like to see a vacancy tax that would start off at nothing, especially for homes people may have just inherited,” she says. “Then we should make sure they have the support to either sell it or do it up and bring it back into use. And if that’s not done within a year, then there’s a 5 per cent or 7 per cent tax on it and that should increase drastically every year ... We were talking to a group in Leeds and there they charge double council tax on homes empty for six months. They take that money and give it to a group of people in a separate organisation that work with owners to find builders, estate agents and tenants to help get them back in use.” She also mentions that significant vacancy taxes in Canada and France also brought a large amount of property back into use. “Vacancy is the gateway to dereliction.”

We move along the street to a more modern three-storey house with hoarding over its windows and doors. There’s another empty house across the street. Both are council owned. “This has got a lot worse in the four years we’ve been here,” says O’Connor.

“The challenge with the council is every time they want to renovate the house they have to go to the department and ask for money and they can only do that once or twice a year,” says Sherry. “They haven’t got autonomy to go and do things.”

“They haven’t any internal staff [to do this] so they have to go to the department and then go to the contractor,” adds O’Connor. “They have less funding than any other councils in Europe.”

The irony, says Sherry, is that if councils took full advantage of the Derelict Sites Act, they could raise money by levying all of the derelict buildings in the city, and not just the smaller number that’s on the official register. She thinks Irish people misunderstand what the Constitution says about private property. “Our Constitution is meant to give us social justice and the common good above private property rights when there’s a situation that warrants it ... There’s a school [nearby]. There are families who live in hotels and have to use the school for their kitchen and to wash their clothes. And those kids pass these empty buildings daily on their way to school. And that’s telling them, ‘You aren’t important enough in this society to warrant a home’, whereas the owners of these properties can sit on them and see their asset value rise continuously. That psychological impact is quite damaging. There’s a lot of research showing ... that large scale vacancy and dereliction has a massive negative impact on our physical and mental health.”

At the other end of Dominick Street, there’s a derelict 1820s home. It’s been empty since the crash and was sold a few times since. The house beside it has been knocked. “In the Netherlands if it’s pre-second World War they’re quite protective of it,” says O’Connor. “This is probably going to be demolished ... This one is actually on the derelict register — it’s one of the few that is.”

We walk up to Castle Market Avenue, where an empty pub called the Roisin Dubh sits across to the rusted skeleton of another long abandoned building project. “The pub is getting worse every week,” says O’Connor. “You can see the broken windows.”

Sherry mentions John Kenneth Galbraith’s critique of “private affluence and public squalor” as we walk by. She points to a small patch of green in front of some nearby houses. “If we were in the Netherlands there’d be a playground there. Every corner has something on it for children.”

“The dereliction takes away so much,” says O’Connor. “We’d love for families to move into the city centre. But we recognise why it’s very difficult for them to do that. The traffic is quite heavy and we haven’t come across any playgrounds on our walk ... If you want families to move back in, you’ve got to make it liveable and fix the aesthetics of the city.”

We soon reach a grand house covered with cooing pigeons and some foliage emerging from a hole in its roof. The windows are boarded over. “In 2002 [or] 2003 this was a perfectly good home,” says O’Connor “This wasn’t on the derelict site register. Still isn’t ... When I started posting on Twitter, this was the first on the thread so people kept seeing it.”

What was the response to the Derelict Ireland hashtag? “People weren’t even seeing the dereliction any more, and then they began to see it again,” says O’Connor. “It started people looking up.”

Did anyone dislike their Twitter activism? “A lot of people were encouraging us to stop,” he says.

Why? “Because they don’t want to paint the city in a bad light,” he says. “People say ‘Why Cork?’ We live in Cork and you have to start where you live. But dereliction is everywhere in Ireland. Cork is a beautiful city. People are so friendly and it’s an ideal 15-minute city. If you took out the dereliction and brought the city back to life you would bring people from all over the world here.”

What other things do critics say? “‘You’re not going to change anything and you can’t go after property rights,’” says O’Connor. He thinks there is some cultural resistance to fixing these problems. “It’s back to The Field and John B Keane. You’re not meant to interfere with someone else’s property.”

Many derelict buildings seem to stay off the derelict register by going into an endless cycle of sales, or repeated planning requests that are never acted on. In other instances, owners leave properties decay, so they eventually might get permission to have them demolished. “We’ve seen places where they’ve taken off the roof, and just left it there for 10 years,” says Sherry.

Why is the council so slow to engage? “Often they say they can’t find the owner,” says O’Connor. “But we did a few simple experiments where we knocked next door to a property and the owner turned up within a few days.”

We walk on down towards Blarney Street where they point out another long empty house, before I spot some derelict looking buildings on an old market square. “You’re getting good at this now,” says O’Connor. “That used to be a bakery. It’s an old Dutch building. It was built in 1780, an old, old building ... I think this is one of the best in the city. We started highlighting it a couple of years ago now and it’s generated a lot of conversation ... The bakeries started to shut down in the 60s or 70s when you had industrial large-scale bread production.”

What’s happening with it now? “They had planning,” says Jude. “But they’ve gone for planning again. I don’t know why.”

We walk on, stopping on the way to look at a warehouse built from Cork red sandstone and limestone, substances that are no longer mined. “Unfortunately, these often get knocked down and smashed to bits,” says O’Connor. “In Europe these would either be creative workshops or apartments. These were built to last, that’s why they’re here two or three hundred years later. Meanwhile, we see new buildings that are a few years old with cracks in the walls.”

We pass a recently shut post office and walk towards Pope’s Quay, where two long-empty four-storey buildings stand. Across the river, at the historic north gate of the city, an actual stone gate, formerly that of the Tanora factory, stands alone with some bins, hidden behind the more modern Northgate House. Nearby sits a whole collection of disused buildings, right in the city centre. As we walk by, O’Connor points to an ornate iron gate, with the words RH Parker and Son, that leads into an overgrown space. “That gate alone should be preserved.”

“In Amsterdam after the crash, the office vacancy rate was 14 per cent,” says Sherry. “They said ‘That’s not acceptable’ ... And so they’ve brought it down to six or seven now. They had to go on a massive campaign working with the owners of offices to transfer them into homes and other uses. We have [an office] vacancy rate of 19.1 per cent in Cork city.” Some towns, she says, “you’re talking about up to 30 per cent vacancy for retail spaces”.

On North Main Street, Sherry points to a former bank, now containing sheltered apartments run by the Peter McVerry Trust. “That’s a success story,” she says. Further up the street, however, there stands a row of five old four-storey buildings dating from the late 18th to the early 19th century, some held up with iron trusses since one of them largely collapsed. “We moved here in November 2018,” says Sherry. “And then in the summer that collapsed. It was unusual to move to a city and have something collapse. There’s a building on the corner there that fell 20 years ago and killed a lady. You’d think something like that would be a catalyst so that it didn’t happen again.”

“They’re CPOed [have a compulsory purchase order] now,” says O’Connor of the row of derelict buildings. “In theory they’ll come up for sale ... We have asked [Cork City Council] quite a few times for a proper register, an inventory of architectural heritage ... We don’t have a record of every building.”

More generally, the authorities don’t track vacancy and dereliction well in Ireland, says Sherry. “The census has [more than] 60,000 extra homes that weren’t recorded on the GeoDirectory. Some of these buildings don’t have Eircodes ... The Department of Housing had a policy since 2018 where they were meant to come up with robust agile ways to record vacancy and they still haven’t.”

“Cork’s a rich city,” says O’Connor. “There’s huge employment here. There’s huge money here ... This is a lovely street. It should be thriving.”