There are 35 vape and phone shops in Cork city centre, dereliction campaigners have said.<\/p>\n
In response to criticisms of the trend, Cork City Council said current legislation does not allow it to distinguish between these stores and other retail outlets during the planning process.<\/p>\n
Frank O\u2019Connor and Jude Sherry, of anti-dereliction lobby group Derelict Ireland, said they have been advocating to shine a light on the scale of vacancy and dereliction in Cork city, and have seen more and more buildings coming back to life as homes and businesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever,\u201d they added, \u201cthere has been a worrying trend in recent years of a proliferation of vape and phone shops in what were, in some cases, vacant or derelict buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is particularly evident in Cork city centre, where they say they counted 35 of these stores, 23 of which promote vaping on the shop front.<\/p>\n
They said: \u201cThat\u2019s a lot of vaping and phone repairing within a 1km city centre radius.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a time where cigarettes are deemed societally unacceptable due to health concerns, it seems strange to be so aggressively promoting and enabling an equivalent unhealthy activity, while many of the shop fronts would also seem to be flaunting council policy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The council\u2019s shop-front policy states: \u201cGround-floor shop fronts shall be consistent with the fenestration details and architectural and streetscape character of the remainder of the structure or of neighbouring structures.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr O\u2019Connor and Ms Sherry added: \u201cThere are other concerns too, such as the recent fire in Glasgow\u2019s iconic 1851 train station where the fire started in a vape shop. Vapes that contain batteries are dangerous at every stage of their single linear life cycle, from mining to vaping and disposal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n “This raises questions… what kind of urban centres do we want?\u201d\n <\/p>\n
A motion at the most recent meeting of Cork City Council by Green Party councillor Oliver Moran proposed it should be an objective of the council for 33% of commercial units on Patrick Street to be occupied by local and slow or circular-economy businesses.<\/p>\n
Niall \u00d3 Donnabh\u00e1in, the council\u2019s director of planning and integrated development, said \u201cplanning legislation and guidance does not currently differentiate\u201d between different types of stores.<\/p>\n
Phone and vape stores were raised during discussion of the motion, and Mr \u00d3 Donnabh\u00e1in said: \u201cThis is an issue with legislation \u2014 we don\u2019t have the remit to control it.<\/p>\n
\u201cA vape shop, despite people\u2019s perception, is still a shop.\u201d<\/p>\n
If a clothing store shuts down and the new owners seek to open a vape shop there, this does not require change-of-use planning permission, like changing it to a restaurant, bar, office, or betting shop would.<\/p>\n
He added that the council was looking into places that could be defined as an architectural conservation area, where specific types of use for buildings in those areas would be set out that could prohibit vape shops \u201cwhere people have concern the nature and character of the area would change negatively\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, he said \u201cwe don\u2019t want to put overly restrictive policies in place\u201d that would prevent businesses from bringing vacant commercial units into use.<\/p>\n
Labour councillor Peter Horgan previously said the council should not be allowing \u201cgarish\u201d vape shop fronts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are 35 vape and phone shops in Cork city centre, dereliction campaigners have said. In response to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4257,79,6037,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-342362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-cork-business","tag-cork-news","tag-cork-city-council","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}