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.