Prison site bought by State has cost €660,000 to maintain

More than €660,000 has been spent in the last four years on maintenance at the Thornton Hall site in North Dublin, which was bought 12 years ago to house a prison that was supposed to replace Mountjoy jail.

The 150-acre site, purchased in 2005 for some €29.9 million, has not yet been built on, but part of it has been used for a horticulture project.

With ancillary costs, including access road and services development, site preparation and surveys, communications, sewage works and legal fees, the total cost of the project has been estimated at more than €50.6 million.

Since 2013 an additional €660,915 has been spent on maintenance, repairs and utilities, but the sum does not include the cost of security at the fully serviced site.

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Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan released the figures to Independents4Change TD Tommy Broughan.

Maintenance, repairs and utilities cost €181,280 in 2013; €248,190 in 2014; €117,930 in 2015 and €62,001 last year. Up to June 15th of this year, the spend has been €51,514.

Public Accounts Committee

In 2015, the Public Accounts Committee examined the purchase of Thornton Hall and noted a Valuation Office report from February of that year, which put a value of €2.4 million on the 150 acres for which the State paid €29.9 million.

Described as a Celtic Tiger boom mistake, the site was intended to be a 1,400-cell prison over three phases to cost €525 million in total to build.

It was intended to replace Mountjoy where overcrowding and the use of chamber pots and consequent “slopping out” were major issues.

However, delays in the Thornton Hall project and the recession resulted in refurbishment in Mountjoy and the creation of 92 additional cells to deal with overcrowding, costing more than €27 million.

A report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, the State’s spending watchdog, said the decision to buy Thornton Hall was underpinned by inadequate cost evaluation.

In 2006, the then government decided the site would also be used for the relocation of the Central Mental Hospital and for a new women’s prison, but those projects never commenced on the site.