High price of ministers' hubris over Mountjoy

Contentious decisions by John O'Donoghue and Michael McDowell have cost taxpayers many millions of euro, writes Vincent Browne.

The kindness of strangers on which we will rely very soon for the solvency of our State, according to Morgan Kelly writing in the Irish Times on Monday, might extend to running the country – the whole lot of it.

For almost every aspect of our public affairs is marked by spectacular incompetence, an incompetence accompanied by an indifference to incompetence. In the case of Ministers, spectacular incompetence is accompanied by spectacular hubris. Take this example.

In his revealing book on Mountjoy, the former governor, John Lonergan, writes on the tale of Thornton Hall, the supposed site of the supposed new prison in north Dublin. The following is his story of what happened (the comments and speculation on the facts are mine).

In December 1999, the then head of the Irish Prison Service, Seán Aylward (now secretary general of the Department of Justice), asked John Lonergan to chair a group to examine the future of the Mountjoy prison complex. The group produced a report in May 2000 which recommended the redevelopment of the Mountjoy site to provide 800 prison places.

It recommended the development of a new prison on the existing site, because Mountjoy was an already working prison and there was no problem with the local community; the location was convenient for visitors; emergency services were nearby, and great savings would be achieved by integrating the existing four facilities (the prison, St Patrick's Institution, the training unit and the Dóchas Centre) on the site into one large one – so for example, there would be one kitchen instead of four.

The Interim Prison Authority Board accepted the report in June 2000. Aylward asked the group to draw up a more detailed report, and this was completed by February 2001. The interim board accepted the recommendations in full, and Aylward told Lonergan that the then Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, John O'Donoghue, had accepted the report, and the group should get on with the development and start the work on the new prison. The minister didn't want any more reports – he wanted action.

Then, out of the blue, on August 16th, 2001, Lonergan was told by Dept of Justice officials that the minister wanted the work to start before he left the office of Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform. This was less than a year before the anticipated general election in May 2002.

Obviously, O'Donoghue was anticipating promotion, and wanted to show evidence of a new prison at Mountjoy on his CV. The department officials said O'Donoghue wanted a new main gate to be built more or less immediately, on the basis of designs drawn from recommendations of a report of several years previously that had no bearing on the plans that supposedly had been approved a few months previously by the department.

Understandably, Lonergan pointed out that this would result in a major cock-up and a waste of money. There was argument about this over a few months, and on February 4th, 2002, a few months before the anticipated election, Lonergan was informed that the main gate idea was going ahead at a cost of €8 million, even though the gate that was to proceed bore no relationship to the plans for the new prison that had been approved.

On April 8th of that year, O'Donoghue announced the Mountjoy development was going ahead and that he had given approval for the first phase, the new gate, or rather the gate from the old designs.

In June 2002 Michael McDowell (pictured) was appointed Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform. There was no more talk about building the new gate. Without any consultation with Lonergan – the governor of the prison – a decision was taken in April 2003 that most of the Mountjoy complex was to be demolished, and that part of the site was to be sold off. A new prison was to be built on a greenfield site.

On January 26th, 2005, Lonergan heard on the radio that the Thornton Hall site had been purchased and that the new prison was to be located there. The site was purchased for €199,000 an acre, a multiple of land prices in the area (as the Comptroller and Auditor General found in a report subsequently).

More than €41 million has been spent on developing the site, but now the plans are to build the new prison "over a number of years" – and instead of there being 800 places there are to be just 400.

As a little sweetener to this story, some time back in 2005 McDowell ordered the purchase of a premises next door to Mountjoy, Egan's Cash and Carry, for something in the region of €28 million.

Apparently McDowell's vaunted expertise extended to property valuation, and he thought this would be a great idea for it would add to the value of the Mountjoy site, which was to be sold off. The value of the site now of course is close to zero.

There is no hope.