State's new land purchase at Kerry's Conor Pass may become a national park
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The State is to be the new owner of a Kerry river and lake fishery at the famed Conor Pass previously owned by a British peer, a Luxembourg-based steel industrialist, and several private Irish citizens, including Richard Roche of the Roches department store dynasty.
The approximately €1.5m acquisition of the ‘source to sea’ Owenmore Fishery on 480 acres, to include 180 acres of water in nine lakes, is very close to concluding, sources confirm.
It will be added to the 1,400 acres the State has also been negotiating on since 2023, widely expected to create a new National Park and visitor attraction starting at close to 2,000 wild acres and Special Area of Conservation at the Dingle Peninsula’s magnificent 1,500ft high Conor Pass.
Once both are secured, the adjacent tracts of land and lakes on the northern side of Dingle’s Conor Pass could enable Ireland’s eighth national park, and just the second of the 21st century after the Boyne Valley opened in 2023.
Ireland’s very first was in 1932, the Killarney National Park, with 26,000 acres: now Kerry looks like going for the double at the Conor Pass.
The first jig-saw piece, the proposed sale of 1,400 acres at the Conor Pass made international news headlines in August 2023 when offered with a €10m price tag by its US-based owner Michael Noonan who had assembled various holdings, leading to swift calls for it to be acquired by the State and protected as a National Park.
Taoiseach Leo Varadker then confirmed that the State would indeed be interested, but not at that €10m price level.
Since, political and other sources indicate the State has been in advanced purchase negotiations, at an undisclosed price level.
A statement from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage said, “The National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) at the department occasionally purchases land for strategic and conservation purposes. Such acquisitions are considered on a case-by-case basis. For many reasons, not least commercial sensitivity, we would not comment on any individual site that is offered for sale.”
A second jig-saw piece, the Owenmore Fishery, followed for sale last September for owner Richard Roche, who had acquired it in 2005 to preserve its fishing. Previous owners of the fishery, lakes, and 33 named pools draining 17 square miles at Mount Brandon and the Conor Pass include a European steel magnate Paul Metz, and Co Limerick stud farm owner Lord Harrington, Walter Stanhope, a British peer.
Owenmore’s selling agent Michael H Daniels this week declined to confirm the State as the buyer at the reported €1.5m price he’d launched it at last autumn. Last year, he commented, “Should the OPW or Inland Fisheries wish to further safeguard the river system and this wonderful landscape for future generations, the holding represents a chance to take the lands and river into State control.”
Now, with possible angling hyperbole, Dingle peninsula locals are hoping the State has indeed landed a dolphin-sized catch.
Local Fianna Fáil councillor Breandan Fitzgerald said the Conor Pass purchase “will be like Fungi the dolphin coming to Dingle. We lost Fungi but we will have gained a national park,” he told Radio Kerry.