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CORK CITY COUNCIL is taking coffee giant Starbucks to court to try to shut its shop on Patrick Street.
In a statement to TheJournal.ie, a spokesperson for Cork City Council confirmed that the case had been referred to the courts, after Starbucks refused to comply with a closure order by 29 June 2017.
The outlet opened in 2015 and was one of three Starbucks in Cork city to open without planning permission.
In March 2016, An Bord Pleanála body ruled that the three developments – the other two are in Opera Lane and Princes Street – amount to a change of use, meaning planning permission is needed for all outlets.
On several occasions since, Starbucks has been denied applications to operate the premises as it would any other of its coffee shops.
City plans designate Patrick Street as primarily a retail area, as per the most recent development plan for Cork.
At various stages, Starbucks attempted to remove the tables, seats and toilets from the location in a bid to make it unnecessary to require planning permission, An Bord Pleanála has noted.
Despite this, however, An Bord Pleanála has ruled that the Starbucks did require planning permission to operate the site. In a determination in March of this year, An Bord Pleanála said that the site was not an “exempted development” from planning permission.
It said: “The Board was also satisfied that the change of use from the former retail use to the use as a “coffee shop”, as proposed, raises external matters that are material in planning terms, and that therefore the change of use in this instance constitutes development.”
The Cork City Council spokesperson said: “Cork City Council is actively pursuing enforcement action in this instance. Following confirmation in March 2017 from An Bord Pleanála that the use is not exempted development, the Planning Authority issued an Enforcement Notice with the requirement to cease the unauthorised use and restore the premises to its former condition by 29 June 2017.
In cases where Enforcement Notices are not complied with the matter is referred to the Council’s Law Department for prosecution through the courts.
Speaking to TheJournal.ie, local councillor Sean Martin said that there are already plenty of nearby coffee shops, and cited the case of a Caffe Nero outlet that was denied planning permission in the same area in recent weeks.
“We need to make sure our planning laws work,” he said.
The council spokesperson added that the Caffe Nero had been denied permission “on the basis that the development frontage materially contravenes planning policy objectives for the protection of St Patrick Street as prime retail frontage”.
The nearest Starbucks to the Patrick Street branch is on Opera Lane, 200m away.
Cork is not the only area where Starbucks has opened premises without planning permission.
Last September, the multinational conglomerate opened a store in Waterford city. It was opened without planning permission, prompting Waterford County Council to lodge an enforcement case.
In general, planning permission must be sought when changing the use of a building from a shop or retail store to a restaurant or café.
Starbucks has argued in many of the above cases that its outlets didn’t change the use of the buildings in question.
In Howth in Dublin, and the outlets in Cork, for example, the company said that the service provided in its store didn’t constitute a restaurant or café and therefore planning permission didn’t need to be sourced.
“The issue here is that everyone else has to go through planning,” Labour county councillor for Fingal Brian McDonagh told TheJournal.ie.
There’s an issue here where you can get a competitive advantage if you just plough ahead in lots of different locations.
At the time of publication, Starbucks has not responded to requests for comment from TheJournal.ie.
With reporting from Cormac Fitzgerald
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Best description I have read when trying to explain cloud, particularly to non techie senior managers is a very simple one liner.
‘Storing your information on someone else’s computer’
Cloud is a window for the NSA.
Frank, does that mean they have access to all data ?
Noone knows for sure but we have good reason to suspect they do.
Sometimes Frank, among all the crazy talk, you do hit the nail on the head.
Security experts also suspect they have a backdoor to break AES encryption.
More than likely they have a back door to your PC and Smart phone irrespective and without a warrant also any email / internet transaction through a US based server can be spied on by the NSA.. Here’s the timeline for domestic Spying…
It is prudent to assume that EVERYTHING is compromised.
I said AES in my last comment. I meant DES.
check out arxshare, this will be difficult for the NSA ;)
What about Mega.co.nz? You get 50gb free & it uses end to end encryption.
Mega is hardly reliable though is it?
Could go down tomorrow for all we know
Data Protection hate the cloud. You have no guarantee as to where your data is stored and no idea of who has physical access. If you hold any sort of confidential data, do NOT use a public cloud. If it’s only your own photos, music and documents, then go for it.
NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a far cheaper per gb ,and safer alternative.
Basically a hard drive connected to your router so it can be accessed online from anywhere. Should be the next big thing in the consumer tech market
It’s cheaper per gb at first glance only.
When you consider quality and reliability of that access – then it’s not that instant winner anymore.
And security wise – many would argue here. If setup wrongly, nas drive may be childishly easy to break into, while professional cloud services mentioned in the article, while still exposed to some breach have the basics definitely better covered – allow less user error.
Of course if you buy crap you get crap but for relatively low investment you can get great quality.
Reliability again is down to your in segment in broadband – invest well get reliability.
Security-wise I’d rather have my data sitting in a hard drive beside my router rather than in a data centre I have no control of – not who handles my drive.
NAS drive:
- uses your household electricity (I know small, but…), cloud not
- is dependable on your Internet connection, cloud is hosted on mesh of super fast links and basically always ON
- is not great for sharing, cloud is (imagine 10 co-workers downloading large graphics files from your NAS)
- is not providing any data redundancy (if your NAS fails your data is gone – unless you have another solution setup for it), cloud is fully redundant
- cannot easily scale, cloud scale very easily if your demands grow
Security? There is no such thing as privacy in the Internet, connecting own NAS disk does not change anything here. You are still using online banking, Facebook, you are still sending emails with attached CV’s or payslips that are stored on email servers, you are still buying in the Internet… Everywhere you touch you leave trace. Therefore cloud is as secure as anything else to me :)
If your house floods or goes on fire your “cloud” storage hasn’t worked at all. Off site backup is key and NAS at home is a crap option unless your get some enjoyment from making things harder then they need to be.
Protip: for people who need large amounts of storage or are concerned about it being spied on, go onto dabs.ie.
Look up western digital my cloud.
1tb own personal cloud you can access anywhere, if I remember right it’s the bones of 100 quid.
Easy set up and no worries.
Also, it’s a physical thing you connect to your own network at home via Ethernet cable, it’s not an online service.
If you’ve got a VPN as well, about as secure as possible.
It’s not a cloud. Its a server.
I’m aware it’s a NAS server but let’s try to keep it simple here.
1. Worry – what if you are burgled and they take the NAS?
Jamie, what kind of authentication and encryption are you using for that?
“Copy” is another cloud based storage app. 35GB’s of space.
Dropbox is the best by far.
I didn’t see any mention of the fact that providers use bots to read your data in order to direct advertising at you. I wouldn’t put anything in the cloud without first applying 128 bit AES encryption.
Dropbox is the best, and very easy to use with a nice interface
Just set your libraries to sync to OneDrive and forget it. It’s solid in all areas and the Office online apps are useful in a pinch.
Simplicity is key.
Logmein’s “Cubby” is brilliant if you need access to clients files. You can create a directory for each client and lock it down with a unique password. It can be setup so each client can only see they’re directory. You get 5gb free, plus it has an app for iOS & Android. I’m paying €45 a year for 1tb of data. Also, If you accidentally delete files, you can recover them anytime and from anywhere. I tried a few cloud systems and most had problems with security and access.
Flickr has an allowance of 1000 gb free.
“That said, each service offers encryption to make sure your data is safe but on the users’ end, the best thing to do is to create a strong password”
I very much disagree with this. Security and privacy must be the main argument for choosing a cloud storage solution, and although they all offer encryption, all mentioned services encrypt on the server, and therefore are not secure and see transport the user’s data in plain text.
There is a trend towards client-side encryption (or end-to-end encryption) and self-hosted clouds. Companies that want to secure their intellectual property should consider solutions like Owncloud or Arxshare http://www.arxshare.com.
wuala.com
- As best I recall, all servers are in Europe.
- Uses ‘Client side’ encryption.
- Can sync easy with your chosen PC folders.
- Mobile apps.
- Only 5gb free.
have your say