Govt accused of paying too much for prison site
The Government will be paying five times over the market price for the €30m green field site for Mountjoy Prison and the Central Mental Hospital, it was claimed today.
Fine Gael claimed that the 150-acre plot on the Dublin/Meath border should only have cost €40,000 per acre instead of the €200,000 per acre price that justice minister Michael McDowell announced last week.
Fine Gael’s justice spokesman Jim O’Keeffe said the “outrageous price” was a “gross mismanagement of taxpayers’ money” and asked the Oireachtas Justice Committee to probe it.
“It was Minister McDowell who chastised the Taoiseach about his Bertie Bowl vanity project. He has now found his very own vanity project in north Co Dublin,” he said.
Mr O’Keeffe said that local property experts were stunned at the exorbitant price paid by the minister.
”The commercial value of this land is in the order of €40,000 per acre, meaning that the very most he should have paid for the land would be €6m.
The Cork TD claimed that the sudden nature of the land deal showed that value for money considerations were low on the minister’s agenda.
Mr O’Keeffe said the minister had set a dangerous precedent by paying in excess of the market value for the land and called on him to cancel the deal.
He added: “To bring this deal to a closure would be grossly foolhardy on the minister’s part and shows a massive dearth of business acumen.”
Mr O’Keeffe also called on Mr McDowell to explain why he did not issue Compulsive Purchase Orders on sites or invite tenders from other landowners in the Dublin/Meath border area.
