State ‘squandered’ €15m on prison site buy

MORE than €15 million of taxpayers’ money was “squandered” on giving the owner of the Thornton Hall prison site a stigma bonus, the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) heard yesterday.

Opposition members of the body expressed outrage at the “extraordinary” way the €29.9m purchase was handled by the Justice Department. The State’s financial watchdog found the Government paid more than twice the market value for the 150-acre stretch of land in north Co Dublin, which is to house the replacement for Mountjoy Jail.

The Comptroller and Auditor General John Purcell noted the Prison Service was told by property consultants charged with finding a suitable site that land in the Fingal area would usually go for €75,000-€100,000 an acre but due to the “stigma” of the vendor being blamed locally for the erection of a prison it would cost €200,000 an acre.

Socialist TD Joe Higgins said: “Every landowner must now be screaming ‘please stigmatise me’ so that I can get such a massive sum for my land.”

Labour’s Joan Burton warned the department that development opportunities on land around the new prison would now be worth “billions” when water and sewerage services were extended to the prison.

She insisted the Government should try to recoup some of the money “wasted” on the site by driving a hard bargain with private companies who will help build the jail and then stand to benefit from the expected growth in the area.

Green TD and PAC member Dan Boyle said the amount “squandered” on the land was far more than €15m as land in the area was worth no more than €40,000 an acre, or €6m for the site. He questioned why alarm bells did not ring in the department last December at the “extraordinary coincidence” when it was approached about buying the Thornton Hall site for €31.5m within a day of a deal to build the jail on a 100-acre site in Coolquay costing €31.35m falling through.

Justice Department secretary general Sean Aylward defended the cost of the purchase, especially against the C&AG’s finding that the land could have been acquired cheaper if the Government had used a third party and not advertised the site was to house a prison.

“It would be ethically questionable for the State to put any person in a situation where they were tricked into selling land for a prison development and became the object of local hostility forcing them to leave as a result,” he told the PAC.

Fianna Fáil TD and PAC member Sean Fleming congratulated the department on the “outstanding achievement” of getting the land for €200,000 an acre.