  We introduce holed cone structures on 3-manifolds to generalize cone
structures. In the same way as a cone structure, a holed cone structure induces
the holonomy representation. We consider the deformation space consisting of
the holed cone structures on a 3-manifold whose holonomy representations are
irreducible. This deformation space for positive cone angles is a covering
space on a reasonable subspace of the character variety.
