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Thornton Proposed Site for the Replacement of Mountjoy Prison
- Key Facts
06 October 2005
Minister McDowell's challenge to his critics on Thornton
Key Facts
Mountjoy Prison needs to be replaced. Conditions in Mountjoy have been severely criticised by the Council of Europe Committee on the Prevention of Torture and other Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. They have also been roundly condemned by the Inspector of Prisons. Redeveloping the existing 20 acre site at Mountjoy is neither financially viable at an estimated cost of in excess of Euro400m nor is it practical from an operational or developmental perspective. Even if this investment was made the site would remain constrained with no scope for football fields or other rehabilitative facilities.
Building a new prison campus on a new site will open up new opportunities. The development of a green field site means that we will have the room to develop progressive rehabilitative facilities, introduce single person cells with in cell sanitation to end the inhumane practice of slopping out. The size of the Thornton site (150 acres) allows considerable flexibility for a campus style development with modern work practices as well as allowing the Irish Prison Service to plan for the future, taking into account the projected rise in our population. The Irish Prison Service estimates that annual savings of the order of Euro30,000 per prisoner can be generated on a new green field site.
A transparent process was put in place to find a site for the new prison. A Committee was established to evaluate and select a replacement site for Mountjoy chaired by a senior official in the Department of Justice and including one of the Commissioners of Public Works and other officials of the Irish Prison Service. Advertisements were placed in the newspapers in February 2004 asking landowners to offer suitable sites for sale. The Committee's minutes were published in full on the Department's website following the purchase.
That process led to the examination of a large number of different sites. More than 30 sites were put forward and assessed. No suitable sites were offered at agricultural prices. Even including the totally unsuitable sites, the average price sought was of the order of Euro200,000 per acre but some owners sought as much as Euro500,000 per acre. The site at Thornton represents the cheapest suitable site of all those offered.
A site at Coolquay was initially chosen for purchase but the deal fell through. A price of Euro31m was agreed for the 98.5 acre site, equivalent to Euro320,000 per acre. But negotiations with the vendor fell through. Assertions that the vendor offered the land for sale again at a later stage are not true. His solicitor wrote to the Property Advisor to the Committee on 21 December 2004 "to advise that he is not proceeding further with the sale of the lands and has asked that all arrangements with the Department of Justice now terminate." In January, 2005, he indicated that he was waiting for a favourable revenue ruling and that if he received it he would then make up his mind on what strategy he would take in relation to the property. The vendor had not re-confirmed his willingness to sell prior to the signing of the contract for the Thornton purchase.
Of all the sites deemed suitable by the Site Selection Committee, Thornton represented the cheapest price per acre. The Thornton site was initially offered for consideration to the Irish Prison Service by a local auctioneer. They referred him to the Committee's advisor Mr Ronan Webster. The vendor's auctioneer had offered a different site earlier in the process which was rejected by the Committee in September 2004. The Thornton site was evaluated and awarded points according to the same criteria as applied to the other sites. On this set of criteria the site was evaluated as marginally preferable to the site at Coolquay (333 points versus 330 for Coolquay). However the price was considerably cheaper per acre at Euro199,999 as opposed to Euro320,000 for Coolquay.
There have been allegations that price was not a factor. This is fundamentally wrong. What the committee did was to eliminate the price factor from their scoring for two reasons - firstly because vendors were only supplying tentative estimates of the price at that stage and secondly strenuous negotiation on the final price was obviously going to follow on from a decision on whether any site was suitable. This proved to be the case with the negotiations on Thornton originally opening at a very much higher price per acre and concluding with the final deal of Euro199,900 per acre. Coolquay was originally offered at a significantly higher price than the price under negotiation when the deal fell through.
Was the purchase rushed? The Site Selection Committee knew that any vendor would be quite likely to be placed under intense pressure from neighbours and adjoining landowners to pull out of a deal if it became known that they were considering a sale of land for a prison. For this reason, there was a good reason, once a site was selected as suitable and once it was to be the subject of a Departmental and Government decision to minimise the time between selection and the signing of a binding contract. After a number of disappointments, the Committee was determined to be decisive once a suitable site was identified at a reasonable price.
Did the fact that the land would be used for a prison make it necessary to pay a higher price? Apart from the need for confidentiality to avoid local opposition disrupting a sale, the fact that land was to be used for a prison would obviously deter people with larger land parcels from offering part of their lands for purchase since their remaining lands would be contiguous to a prison campus. This factor meant that vendors had to have a holding in the narrow band of acreage that suited the IPS. It also meant that vendors hoping for a long-term re-zoning of all their lands were faced with a choice - sell all your land now at a very substantial premium or don't sell at all.
Was the price paid for Thornton which was zoned agricultural the going rate for land zoned for residential purposes? No. If the Thornton land had been zoned residential it would have had a value of approximately 5 times the price actually paid, i.e. up to Euro1m per acre. The actual price per acre paid was one fifth the value of zoned residential land in North Dublin but well above the going rate for purely agricultural land. Nobody with 150 acres of land 10 miles from O'Connell Street was willing to sell that land at agricultural prices and nobody offered the Site Selection Committee similar land the same distance from the city centre which was suitable for a prison campus at a lower price per acre than that paid for Thornton.
The Thornton site has many suitable factors:
It's a large site, 150 acres compared to the 20 acres in Mountjoy or 98.5 acres in the Coolquay alternative;
It is only 10 miles away from O'Connell Street;
It is away from any large population centre, town or village;
It is on a straight road, which is less than a mile from a primary national route giving good access to Gardai, fire service and local hospitals and it has separate rear access;
A motorway is being built nearby with access to M50 and the national motorway network;
The Irish Prison Service envisage providing shuttle transport to the campus.
The Opposition's argument that Coolquay, at Euro320,000 per acre represented value for money while Thornton Hall at Euro199,000, just 2,500 yards away, was a rip off is illogical. Both were zoned agricultural. The Opposition stood by and watched Mountjoy deteriorate and did nothing. Now all they can do is criticise a Minister who has the courage and vision to act.
Not a single suitable site cheaper than Thornton has been identified by any of those in the Opposition who argue that too much was offered for Thornton.
Does anyone SERIOUSLY believe that the Minister can purchase a parcel of 150 acres of land less than 10 miles from O'Connell Street to build a prison for less than Euro30m? If so, where is that land? Who is offering it? Why did they not offer it to the Site Selection Committee?
The Minister has no compulsory purchase powers. If he had just sent scouts out to try to buy farms as they came up for sale, he would have been accused of selecting a site on totally irrational grounds and of not giving other land owners a chance to submit more suitable sites. He had to follow a transparent process in which all landowners were invited to offer suitable land for evaluation and purchase.
Was the invitation to offer land time limited? Was Thornton allowed into the reckoning unfairly? No. The Site Selection Committee never excluded property offered on the basis that it was offered too late. The advertisements did not state that late entrants would not be considered. It was not a sealed tendering process in the legal sense. Other property notified to the Committee after the indicative date in the advertisements was considered and rejected on suitability grounds
RTE's coverage of the matter on Prime Time was utterly misleading. They quoted selectively from the wide range of evidence available to them and made no attempt to source any interviewees in favour of relocating Mountjoy, despite the fact that most stakeholders agree this is necessary:
- No attempt was made to explain to the viewers that the Thornton Hall site was in fact one third cheaper per acre than the Coolquay site.
- While Thornton Hall was described as "otentially rich in archaeology"no reference was made to the flooding potential of the lands at Coolquay.
- It was unambiguously stated that the vendor of Coolquay had changed his mind and was making his site available again to the IPS. As the evidence shows, this did not happen.
- No attempt was made to inform the viewers that the Site Selection Committee at its meeting of 18th January had before it a site evaluation report prepared by Clifton Scannell Emerson Consulting Engineers and McCabe Durney Planning Consultants. These facts were evident to the makers of the programme from the minutes published on the Department' website.
- No attempt was made to explain to the viewers that in the course of a year long purchase process no suitable land was offered in County Dublin to the Site Selection Committee at agricultural prices or anything near agricultural prices.
- No attempt was made to explain to the viewers that the price agreed in respect of Thornton Hall was the lowest price of all the sites evaluated as suitable by the Site Selection Committee.
Minister Michael McDowell will proceed undeterred with his reforming prisons policy of:
- Modernising our prisons and rationalising the State' portfolio of prison sites;
- Tackling the overtime culture amongst prison officers;
- Ending slopping out;
- Replacing the Victorian Central Mental Hospital with a state of the art forensic psychiatric facility;
- Ending illegal drug use in our prisons;
- Ending the Prison Visiting Committee expenses gravy train.
MINISTER MC DOWELL'S SIMPLE
CHALLENGE TO HIS CRITICS
"DENTIFY ONE PARCEL OF LAND OF 150 ACRES WITHIN 10 MILES OF O'CONNELL STREET WHICH IS SUITABLE FOR A MAJOR PRISON CAMPUS AND WHICH IS AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE FOR LESS THAN EURO 29M. IF YOU CAN'T, THEN STOP PRETENDING THAT THE SITE SELECTION COMMITTEE AND ITS ADVISOR GOT IT WRONG"
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