According to the regs you can fly NVFR using your CIR as long as you have the normal NVFR experience and recency requirements.
My question is do you also need the CIR recency:
- Renewel in last 15 months and/or
- 3 hours IF time in the last 90 days (or the various equivelants)
There must be some reason why most people get their NVFR instead of going straight to CIR so I am assuming the reason is you need the IFR recency as well, making it a bit impractical when working in a VFR job.