Council order owners of three unfinished North Cork estates to ‘get their act together’
OFFICIALS with Cork County Council have launched the opening salvos of a campaign aimed at addressing outstanding issues on three unfinished ‘ghost estates’ in North Cork.
The authority’s acting northern area divisional manager, Niall Healy, has said the council had written to the owners of Lios na Greine in Lismire, once dubbed ‘ the worst ghost estate in Ireland’ and the Lios na Ri and Pastures estates in Charleville giving them 14 days to “get their act together” and resolve the outstanding issues at each of the three estates.
“There are in the order of 48 unfinished estates in North Cork. Some of these have particularly serious outstanding issues while other have site resolution plans in place that are being developed,” said Mr Healy.
He said council officials had met with their solicitors and decided to tackle these three estates as they believe the sites, or structures within them, posed a danger to the public.
Mr Healy said the authority faced two big challenges in addressing the issue of unfinished estates. The first finding out who the current owners, which he said can take “quite an amount of digging and research”. The second problem was the increasing involvement of different venture capital funds, banks, examiners, receivers that can further muddy the waters.
“We are largely complete on the three estates mentioned and will be writing very stiff warning letters to their owners, giving them 14 days in which to get their act together and resolve specific issues to make each site safe. In some cases this will mean undertaking demolition works,” said Mr Healy.
“The issues here are around unfinished houses. You could argue that it is the responsibility of the current owners to address these, but from a public safety issue we as a local authority have a responsibility to take action.”
He said that in the event of the owners failing to reply, the council would issue dangerous structures notices that would legally allow them to take the sites in charge, undertake safety works and recoup their cost from those they issue the notices to.
“This has not been done in the context of unfinished estates to date, and it is not something that you do lightly. We have the statutory notices prepared and are in a position to issue them at the end of the two-week period if required,” warned Mr Healy.
“Some will say nothing to the initial warning letters, others will respond to them, and we will have to take legal advice on a case to case basis. Either way, that will not derail the process,” insisted Mr Healy.