THE FAILURE of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) to honour a deal for the sale of bogland in Co Offaly was described as “disgusting” by a Fine Gael TD at an Oireachtas committee meeting yesterday.
Olwyn Enright said she believed the deal for €5,500 per acre for boglands at All Saints Bog and Esker had not been conducted in good faith.
Ms Enright was speaking at a meeting of the Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs.
Following a two-hour discussion on the matter, the committee agreed to recommend to Minister for the Environment John Gormley that he look again at the issue and pay what had been agreed.
NPWS director Conor O Raghallaigh told the meeting a deal had been agreed with the 14 landowners concerned, but he said there had been no contract.
“The conclusion arrived at was that the proposed agreement would be likely to create a precedent which would lead to considerable pressure to pay the proposed higher rates to all applicants under the voluntary purchase scheme and thus undermine the basis and accepted rates of that scheme,” he said.
He said under the voluntary purchase scheme for bogland the standard rates of €3,500 for the first acre and €3,000 for acres thereafter, were being offered to those interested in selling. These rates were agreed with farming groups in 2004.
Mr O Raghallaigh said if the precedent to pay a higher rate had been set, the overall cost of the scheme to the taxpayer would greatly increase from the projected €24 million.
He accepted the negotiations with the landowners for higher rates of compensation were “ill-advised” but said they had gone ahead because the plots were adjoining one another and it was a very substantial area of very important bogland.
He said the negotiations had “run out of time” because of a review in the Department of the Environment which had decided higher rates should not be paid, pending a decision on more generalised compensation arrangements for the ending of turf-cutting on special areas of conservation.
Fine Gael TD Paul Connaughton, who said he had received a letter to stop cutting turf on the family bog a fortnight ago, said the issue of the price of bogland was only just beginning.
“My family bog is capable of supplying not only my needs for fuel but those of my children and grandchildren and it’s a very valuable asset.
“I would place a value of €250,000 on it,” he said.
He said the NPWS would be getting the Offaly bog at a bargain price and a deal was a deal and should be honoured.
James O’Connell of the NPWS, who took over the negotiations in April 2007 when the owners had rejected an offer of €5,100, said the offer had been increased because of the circumstances and had been made in good faith.