Frank O’Connor and Jude Sherry wanted to show me another side of Cork.
Mr. O’Connor and Ms. Sherry moved to Cork, a city in the south of Ireland, in 2018 after a two-year stint in the Netherlands. They were immediately struck by the number of vacant and derelict properties they found. (In Amsterdam, Mr. O’Connor noted, if a building is empty for more than 12 months, the council can order the owner to take a tenant.) They started a project photographing empty properties and posting them online. Altogether, they said, they found some 700 empty properties within about a mile of downtown.
I met up with them a few months ago for a tour of Cork’s empty and derelict buildings. Our walk started in Shandon, one of the oldest areas of the city and the site of the former Butter Exchange — at one point in the 19th century the largest butter market in the world. We moved across the north of the city before descending toward downtown Cork, which sits on an island between two channels of the River Lee. They showed me properties with “For Sale” signs that looked like they’d been there for a decade or more. Others looked hastily abandoned, with ancient plants forgotten on the windowsills. Some properties at first appeared vacant and in disrepair, but then there would be some hint — a cracked window, a light on — that someone was quietly living there.
There are various estimates of the number of vacant and derelict properties across Ireland. All are in the tens of thousands. The 2022 census recorded well over 100,000: long-abandoned rural cottages; empty apartments in city-center blocks or above shuttered shops in regional towns; fading Georgian townhouses in the center of once-prospering rural villages; and “ghost estates,” housing developments that were being built at the time of the financial crash in 2008 and were never completed.
At the same time, Ireland has a housing crisis that is severe, persistent and deep-rooted. The average rent in Cork increased more than 10 percent in 2023. Dublin, the capital, has become one of Europe’s most expensive cities to rent housing in. Two-thirds of the country’s 18- to 34-year-olds are living with their parents. This year homelessness has reached record levels.