Prison service spends thousands lighting up a 'road to nowhere'

The 150-acre Thornton Hall site was first purchased in 2005 for €30m with a view to building a new prison there to relieve the accommodation pressures being felt at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin city.

The Irish Prisons Service spent thousands of euro operating streetlights over three years on an inaccessible ‘road to nowhere’ to discourage trespassing at the disused €50m site of a farm in north Dublin.

The 1.2 kilometre-long stretch of road at Thornton Hall farm near Ashbourne, first purchased by the State in 2005 for a new prison that was never built, ends abruptly in a dirt path.

It was constructed with street lighting and an underpass to serve as an access road to the prison at a cost of €5m in 2010.

The Irish Examiner recently reported on an open letter, sent to the heads of all of the political parties, decrying a perceived culture of waste in the management of the national property portfolio.

The correspondence, from former managing valuer at the Office of Public Works Allen Morgan, criticised the fact that the disused Thornton Hall road is being illuminated at night, in full view of the nearby R135 road, a fact the letter described as “publicly signposting a wasted €50 million investment”.

Queried as to the reason and cost for the use of the street lighting, the Irish Prisons Service disputed that the unfinished access road could be described as “disused”.

The access road to Thornton Hall maintains a right of way for adjoining farmlands and is a private road and not open to the public.

The spokesperson for IPS said that the street lighting is being maintained at night after “security issues” caused by “major trespass incidents” in 2019 and 2020.

Roughly two-thirds of the lighting on the road had been disabled in 2017, with the remainder kept in use “to support CCTV, security, and access control requirements” they said.

Following the trespass incidents in recent years some of the lights were restored to two-thirds of capacity levels, the IPS said, with work “already underway” to reduce the lights back to one-third capacity by the end of January.

“However, this will be kept under review having regard to previous trespass incidents at the road in question,” the spokesperson added.

They said that the cost of powering the lights could not be separated from that of other systems such as gates and a water pump, but that the overall cost was €18,010. The €6,589 spent in 2021 is a 27% increase on the cost incurred in 2019.

The 150-acre Thornton Hall site was first purchased in 2005 for €30m with a view to building a new prison there to relieve the accommodation pressures being felt at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin city.

It has never been built upon after the State pulled approval for the project at the onset of the economic recession in 2008.

Some €50m has been spent on the site to date, with basic maintenance of the farm in 2020 costing €325,000, five times the outlay in 2019.