Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I agree with Senator Mansergh that private property is sometimes put on a pedestal and the rights of private property are sometimes given too much weight over the public good. As Attorney General I fought over the constitutionality of the social and affordable housing provision in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court made it clear that the rights of private property were not sacrosanct. There were other rights as well and the Constitution clearly authorised a balanced view on these matters to be taken.

I could have sent people out to bid at the back of a hall to purchase suitable farms on the sly for the prison I wanted to build. If I had done that I would immediately have been assailed by the community having a prison visited on them for not looking at or asking for anywhere else, instead sending a man in a dirty mackintosh to raise his newspaper at the back of an auction room. The Department impressed upon me that I had to go through a public procurement process, which altered the terms of trade against me.

It has been argued that I could have come before this House and the other House and given myself compulsory purchase powers, in which case I would have been able to identify a piece of land somewhere near Dublin and serve notice in a newspaper that I was taking it. Let us remember the political realities. It is bad enough to visit a prison on a community but worse still to knock on the door of some farmer in north Dublin and tell him to leave because, in a year's time, I would come and take his farm, his lifestyle and his home in the public interest. If I had gone down that road I would have provoked immense hostility on behalf of a family being thrown out with their possessions on the road saying they were getting agricultural prices for a property I was going to use for non-agricultural purposes, namely, to build a prison.