McDowell in property warning

Minister for Justice Michael McDowell has said the public should realise their property rights could be affected by any legislative changes he might make allowing the State to acquire land for new prisons through compulsory purchase orders.

While Mr McDowell said he had asked his officials to examine the possibility of the State being given the power to acquire future prison sites compulsorily, this was not an admission that mistakes had been made with the payment of €30 million for the Thornton Hall lands in north County Dublin for the new Mountjoy prison.

"Nobody can point to 150 acres 10 miles from the city centre which is cheaper to anybody, including the Minister for Justice than that land [ at Thornton Hall]," he said at the opening of a new Garda station in Bantry, Co Cork, yesterday.

Fine Gael yesterday claimed that if the lands had been acquired through compulsory purchase order (CPO) they would have cost less than €10 million.

The party's justice spokesman,

Jim O'Keeffe TD, said the fact that a review of CPOs for prisons was being carried out after €30 million had been paid for Thornton Hall amounted to "closing the stable door after the horse had bolted".

However, Mr McDowell disputed that a compulsory purchase of Thornton Hall would have reduced the price. He said the use of CPOs for new prisons would have serious implications for some people.

"Are the Irish people willing to have a situation where I just descend on a farm and say I'm taking your farm from you, and you and all your neighbours are left with a decision imposed on them from the top?"

"It's not an easy one, and the policy implications of that have to be thought through. Would everybody be happy that I would have CPO power to purchase a hostel for prisoners on temporary release, that I could go to any road in Ireland and say, I'm taking a house here because it is suitable for my purposes.

"There are two sides to the story and I want to examine it before I go any further."

Earlier yesterday the governor of Mountjoy Prison, John Lonergan said he was in favour of the introduction of technology in prisons which would disable any mobile phones smuggled in to inmates. There have been cases of prisoners directing crime from their cells via smuggled phones.

However, Mr McDowell said such technology might lead to industrial relations difficulties as prison officers would not be contactable by their families while in work. He said more phones would be recovered from inmates if regular searches of cells were carried out.

Mr McDowell said he was due to meet prison governors in the near future on the issue of drug misuse across the prison system and he would take that opportunity to discuss the issue of mobile phone use by inmates.