Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

When we did that we had two choices, we could buy it secretly and sent in people wearing mackintoshes to stand at the back of auctions to pick up a farm without ever telling anybody what we had in mind, or we could do what we did, which was to place advertisements in the newspapers and say we asked people to come forward with lands for a major prison site in the environs of Dublin. We chose the latter course.

As was pointed out by Secretary General and Accounting Officer of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform before the Committee of Public Accounts, as a result of taking that course we paid more than we would have had we sneaked into an auction room and bought on the quiet. That process was likely to produce an uplift in price but it was an honest and transparent one. What was not said in the media was that when the Comptroller and Auditor General queried this, the majority of the participants at that meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts said the Accounting Officer of my Department was right to recommend the open transparent way of doing it and reject the notion that we should have acted in a clandestine or secret way. It was interesting to note that when the parliamentarians received the Comptroller and Auditor General's report, they emphatically endorsed the open-handed approach of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.