For sale: 16-acre site of buried hospital records

OWNERS of the land outside Cork city which was revealed this week as a dumping ground for hospital patient records recently put the site up for sale.

A price tag of about €3 million has been put on the 16-acre piece of ground at Killacloyne, which is adjacent to the new Cork-Midleton commuter rail line.

It was during excavation work for the railway project that hundreds of medical files dating back to the 1970s and 1980s were uncovered on the edge of the site.

The land was formerly used as a landfill, licensed for dry, non-organic, non-toxic waste, but it is believed that the hospital records were dumped there sometime during the ’80s or early ’90s.

Owners of the land, brothers Tom and Pat Ahern who operated the site as a landfill before selling on their waste company — Ahern Industrial Services Ltd — to Greenstar, recently put it on the market.

The sale is being handled by DTZ Sherry Fitzgerald, who describe the site as a “level parcel of land with a desirable shape and extensive rail/road frontage”, in a “high profile location, neighbouring Fota Retail and Business Park and IDA Business and Technology Park and adjacent to the N25 (Cork/Waterford road)”.

While an initial deadline of March 14 was put on the sale, a sufficient offer was not received and the site remains on the market, for sale by private treaty.

While contract work on the Cork-Midleton line has been suspended in the area under investigation, Iarnród Éireann say the overall project will not be affected.

Inquiries into the scandal are expected to take several months to complete. Test digs are taking place close to where the medical files were found and the possibility of excavating the entire 16 acres has not been ruled out.