State would like to buy Conor Pass site but will not pay €10m asking price, says Varadkar

The State would like to buy land that has come up for sale at Kerry’s Conor Pass at a “reasonable price” and will not pay €10 million for it, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said.

The site, comprising 1,000 acres of land and almost 400 acres of forestry, has been put up for sale for €10 million by its American owner. Marketed as the “Connor Pass” the site is being advertised on its own website.

During a press conference on Friday, Mr Varadkar was asked about the possibility of the State buying the land.

“I think it’s fair to say that the State won’t be paying €10 million for it, but we would be interested in talking to the owner about a reasonable price because I’d like to see us extend our national parks,” Mr Varadkar said.

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“Our national parks are a wonderful public asset, and I’d like to see more of them, and I’d like to see them made bigger, but this is taxpayers’ money. And if there’s a reasonable price that we can agree well then I think we’d like to take it into public ownership but the price has to be reasonable.”

Earlier on Friday, Friends of the Irish Environment called on the Government to purchase the site for a national park.

Opinion is divided in Co Kerry, however, with some locals arguing that the money would be better spent acquiring affordable sites for housing.

Speaking on Newstalk Breakfast on Friday, Tony Lowes, director of Friends of the Irish Environment, said a comparison would be made that €10 million could be better spent on the homeless or the health system.

“I think the problem is that people don’t see the value of a national park, the value of taking over an area like this. We put in five national parks in the last 20 years of the last century, and we haven’t put in one this century. And when you look at the kind of things, the advantages we get from them, it really is a bit difficult to understand. I think it’s just that people don’t realise the value of properly conserving and properly managing the land.”

The Conor Pass was “absolutely magnificent” said Mr Lowe who used to live in the area. If allowed to regenerate properly “you would find that birds and creatures of all kinds would flock to it, including tourists,” he said.

“I mean, this is one of the things if you look at Killarney, for instance, Killarney’s tourism is really based entirely on its national park.”

If the Conor Pass was allowed to regenerate, “the skies would fill and the rivers there are going to be again full of fish, as they once were before,” Mr Lowes said, adding: “This is what we’re after. And we can’t do that unless we manage the land properly.”

“If you look at it just in climate terms – if you removed sheep, you’d have less methane emissions, and you’d also have a sink because as the vegetation grows up, it absorbs greenhouse gases. And if we have that kind of sink, that means that we have to reduce things less so we can drive a little more and do those kinds of things a little more.”

When asked about comments by local TD Michael Healy-Rae that the funds would be better spent on social housing, Mr Lowes said the deputy “perhaps” did not realise the economic value of treating land in this way.

The site up for sale includes four lakes – Pedlar’s Atlea, Beirne and Clogharee – along with a waterfall and mature forest. Its American owner Michael Noonan bought the land in parcels over the years and he farms it with grazing sheep.

Bordered on the west by the Owenmore river, and with views over Dingle Town, Brandon Bay and the Atlantic the land is already visited by thousands of walkers and tourists each year. Pedlar’s Lake was used as the backdrop to the film The Field.