A new front in the battle for Ireland’s empty properties has opened up.
Before dawn on Christmas Day, activists took control of an unfinished six-story glass-fronted building in the city of Cork called Stapleton House. Instead of using the 25,000 square feet (2,300 square meters) for offices and stores, they plan to create a cafe, creche, library and music school for community groups.
“We are taking it back for the people of Cork,” Liam Mullaney, a 35-year-old spokesman for the group of about a dozen protesters that seized the government-controlled building, said in an interview at the site. “It belongs to the taxpayers.”
Mullaney and his group are putting an Irish twist on the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began in New York and has spread to cities around the world, and highlighting Ireland’s record number of empty properties, or so-called ghost estates and orphan sites. About 20 percent of Ireland’s office space is vacant, double the European average, according to estimates from CBRE Group Inc. (CBG)
Ireland’s landscape is dotted with empty and unfinished buildings, started during the decade-long real estate boom that ground to a halt in 2008.
The activists say the building has been lying idle since about 2008.
The occupation of Stapleton House is an escalation of a campaign which has seen activists camp in the streets of Cork and in Dublin outside the country’s central bank. Mullaney said he wants his move to set a precedent.
The Occupy Dublin movement says it may seek to follow the lead of their Cork colleagues, while activists in Belfast took over an empty building this week that used to house a Bank of Ireland Plc office in the city.
To contact the reporter on this story: Dara Doyle at ddoyle1@bloomberg.net.
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