CPO stands for property coup
Most of the worst ones are diseases, but a new acronym which landowners dread isn't a disease.
C, P and O are now, for many, the worst letters on an official looking letter coming through the door.
That shouldn't be the case, with the basic principle of Compulsory Purchase Order compensation being financial equality, whereby the claimant should, insofar as money can achieve this, be in the same position financially as if land had never been acquired from him or her by Compulsory Purchase Order.
But a basic problem with CPOs on farmland is that money is seldom the average farmer's top priority. If it was, the farmer would be in a better paying business than farming.
But money in one form or another is the only compensation offered, when a farm is ruined by a CPO.
It can never restore the farm which the owner loved working, even if the income from it was poor.
The compulsory acquisition of land takes place in Ireland to allow public infrastructure projects to go ahead for the common good.
It is an extremely complex area, and farmers are getting wise to this and securing professional advice if they are served with notices of Compulsory Purchase Order.
Affected property owners are entitled to compensation for their losses, including fees and legal costs for the professional advisors who will help the landowner to exercise the right to object, make representations, negotiate, refer to property arbitrators and have objections heard.
But much of our CPO legislation is 150 years old, and it is beginning to show its age in an era when the CPO system has been left so far behind by the economic boom that it no longer works, particularly near the big cities.
As a result, the CPO system seems in some cases to have become a mechanism whereby Government agencies can use their might and power to buy land at the going agricultural rate, which might be only a fraction of what a private buyer might pay for the farm next door, in the real land market.
Then, having CPO'd the land, the Government often passes it on to a Public Private Partnership which operates a toll road.
Everyone makes a big profit, except the landowner.
In many cases, no allowance is even made for land prices rising so fast that a landowner has little hope of replacing land from the proceeds of a CPO, after he has paid his Capital Gains Tax.
The Government did very well with some recent CPOs in north Co Dublin.
Its local authority arm compulsorily acquired some land for the N2 road for €30,000 an acre. Last month, this looked like the property coup of the century, after another government arm, the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, paid €199,333 per acre for land a few miles away, as a site for the new Mountjoy Prison.
The CPO system has been used here to acquire land for one seventh of its market value.
Not before time, landowners are questioning this system.
It will be interesting to see the outcome of a challenge being prepared to the constitutionality of land being CPO'd for the M3 road near Tara, Co Meath.
The argument being put forward is that private land cannot be taken from Irish citizens by a Government partnership with a private toll company, and subsequently used for the financial benefit of that company.
It is expected that €2 billion will be taken in toll charges over the scheduled 30 year concession period for the M3, leaving profits of hundreds of millions of euro for the company that wins the road contract.
However, private land can only be acquired by the State for the "common good"; the argument in the M3 court challenge is that land is being CPO'd only for the benefit of those paying and receiving the tolls on the road.
The new Mountjoy Prison will also be a Public Private Partnership project, with the aim of profit. But landowners can have few complaints about this deal, with a farmer getting top dollar for his property. However, the negotiations for the prison site did show just how much some Co Dublin landowners have been cheated by the CPO system.
Qualifying landowners within 8km of the M50 weren't looking for the €30,000 an acre they might have got in a CPO.
A site was eventually acquired for €200,000 an acre, but at least one landowner lost out on the deal, because they valued their property at a whopping €500,000 per acre.
