Irregular cusps of an orthogonal modular variety are cusps where the lattice for Fourier expansion is strictly smaller than the lattice of translation. The presence of such a cusp affects the study of pluricanonical forms on the modular variety using modular forms. We study toroidal compactification over an irregular cusp, and clarify there the cusp form criterion for the calculation of Kodaira dimension. At the same time, we show that irregular cusps do not arise frequently: besides the cases when the group is neat or contains $-1$, we prove that the stable orthogonal groups of most (but not all) even lattices have no irregular cusp.

We prove a bound relating the volume of a curve near a cusp in a complex ball quotient $X=\mathbb{B}/\unicode[STIX]{x1D6E4}$ to its multiplicity at the cusp. There are a number of consequences: we show that for an $n$-dimensional toroidal compactification $\overline{X}$ with boundary $D$, $K_{\overline{X}}+(1-\unicode[STIX]{x1D706})D$ is ample for $\unicode[STIX]{x1D706}\in (0,(n+1)/2\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B})$, and in particular that $K_{\overline{X}}$ is ample for $n\geqslant 6$. By an independent algebraic argument, we prove that every ball quotient of dimension $n\geqslant 4$ is of general type, and conclude that the phenomenon famously exhibited by Hirzebruch in dimension 2 does not occur in higher dimensions. Finally, we investigate the applications to the problem of bounding the number of cusps and to the Green–Griffiths conjecture.