The price of land is never too far from The Dealer’s mind, and I had to pick my jaw up off the ground this week reading about the land that has been acquired by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) over the past five years on page 19 this week.

It has spent just over €30m in that time period buying up 7,060ac of land. That works out at €4,263/ac for what is a mixture of blanket bog, designated land, other high nature value land and a tract or two of prime farmland.

The most expensive investment will come as no surprise to anybody, with €11m shelled out for the 553ac Dowth lands and manor house in Meath. The former Devenish asset is to be turned into a national park. However, it’s the other tracts of land that have been secured that really got the The Dealer’s goat.

Taking that whopper purchase out of the mix, the price per acre tots up to €19.1m for 6,507ac – or €2,935/ac to you and me.

Value

The head of the NPWS told this newspaper last year that the State body is “very conscious that we have some of the most unique nature sites that are quite unique in Europe” and that the body wanted to acquire land that was beside national parks, high nature value land or designated land. Former Minister for Nature Malcolm Noonan said last year that the NPWS would be buying 165ac of land which he described as “a hugely valuable investment” ecologically in Kilkenny. It bought the land for €3,636 per acre.

Yes, good money has been paid for some of these acquisitions over the past five years. However, many of them have come in at €2,000-€3,000/ac. That’s well below the average prices paid for land across the country, including the west where many of these land acquisitions have taken place.

The Dealer ponders, what value does the State itself place on nature if it is willing to pay these low prices for land it says is of high nature value?

Does the fact that the land is effectively sterilised by designations have anything to do with the low value?

With all the talk of the bike shed at Leinster House, which cost around €335,000, and the 70m wall outside the Workplace Relations Commission costing €490,000, The Dealer has to hand it to the folks at the NPWS – those 7,060ac could perhaps be the best investment of public funds seen in decades but I hate it when my readers are not getting the real value of the asset they have toiled with for generations.

Now that’s what I call public spending.