Cooncil to reopen 'Cottaging' toilets at junkies bequest

Toilets once renowned as a 'cottaging' spot for gay men could be rebuilt and reopened after complaints about a lack of public facilities for heroin addicts to shoot up in near the train station has been made to the Cooncil.

Irvine Smackheads Association (ISA) wants the former lavvies reopened after regularly seeing junkies ‘rattling like Marvin’ looking for loos to shoot up in.

The site - which will cost about £25,000 a year to clean - was shut years ago as part of an NAC cost-cutting exercise.

Cooncil spokesman Shuggy Fullarton said “while there was a risk that 'strange men' might make a return to the toilets he believed the benefit to the general majority of drug addicts in the area outweighed this potential problem.

*Editorial* The cottaging problem is not new to Irvine or North Ayrshire.

The  work to clean up the area at a notorious sex-stop spot is long overdue. For years it has been known that the library on the High Street attracted “men who liked to socialise with other men” as one Sergeant Howie from the Saltcoats once famously dubbed such activity.

Traditionally the gardening books section at the library were the problem.

Indeed it has long been rumoured, but never able to be fully proved so it could be published, that one local MP had twice been apprehended there by police for gross indecency.

In recent times men have moved to performing sex acts in the William Hill on a neighbouring building.

Cottaging is not a new problem in Irvine say NAC who have tried to clean it up

Now the Polis, the Cooncil and managers of the High St have got together to clean the place up and make it more secure in the hope it will be less of an attractive option.

Ra Polis also need to have a visible presence there so that the libraries and bookies are also returned to the use for which they were originally intended.

This is not a judgement of morality about gay sex.

It is about the morality of innocent members of the public being confronted with sexual behaviour.

It is time to clean up the High Street properly, once and for all.